


Un Nouvel Espoir

by kaasknot



Series: Victor Hugo's Star Wars, or: "La Guerre des étoiles" [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, victor hugo - Fandom
Genre: Additional Tags to Be Added, Classism, Digressions, Fantastic Racism, Florid prose, Gen, Implied human/sentient experimentation, Kidnapping, Minor Character Death, Sexism, implied slavery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-09-16
Packaged: 2018-06-01 03:54:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 41,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6499789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaasknot/pseuds/kaasknot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being an account, in pastiche style, of a boy whose story may or may not be the embodiment of the hero’s journey, and who therefore encounters a call to adventure, a wise advisor, a mystical weapon, a road of trials, a rogue, a princess, and a villain (in that order); and who, over the course of fighting an evil empire, finds himself attaining his goals, both symbolic and literal. In space.</p><p>(Victor Hugo writes <i>A New Hope</i>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Solitary Man

**Author's Note:**

> Blame for this can be laid at the feet of [this](http://timegoddessrose.tumblr.com/post/106236599174/so-like-i-know-you-have-parody-books-like-william) tumblr post. Innumerable thanks go to trillgutterbug, zorekryk, and phiillii for holding my hand while I questioned my sanity, and even more thanks to preved-medved, who did a spectacular job as beta. It's gonna be a long haul, y'all.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben Kenobi—The Desert Does Not Share—A Stranger Comes to Anchorhead—The Household of a Desert Hermit—The Quartermaster’s Say—Difficult Neighbors—A Collection of Walking Sticks—The Crisis of the Children—In the Footsteps of a Dragon—The Song in the Grass—A Qualification—Drinks and Politics—The Hermit Confronted With a Vestige of His Past—The Solitude of Ben Kenobi

I. Ben Kenobi

In Year 19 of the Empire (Year 3653 since the signing of the Treaty of Coruscant), Ben Kenobi was a hermit living beyond the Dune Sea. He was then about fifty-nine years of age, and had occupied his desert hovel since Year 0.

Although it has no direct impact on the story we are about to relate, it nevertheless behooves the author to reveal, if only for the sake of completeness and exactness, the various rumors that circulated the person of “Old Ben” Kenobi. True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives--and above all in their destinies--as that which they do.

Very little was known about Ben Kenobi, in honest truth. It was widely known that he was an offworlder, and a recent newcomer to the barren soil of Tatooine; it was less-widely known, though no secret, for Kenobi himself would say as much to those who asked, that he was from the planet Stewjon, in the Daly System. How he had come to reside on Tatooine was the source of much speculation.

Once one entered the realm of rumor, however, the accounts strayed widely. To some, he was a wizard; to others, a crazy old man parched by lack of company. He was alternately a scholar, a monk, a widower, or a scarred veteran of the Clone Wars in search of what peace was left to him. The head mechanic at the Pika Oasis, where he came once a month to replenish his stores, claimed he was the last of the Jedi Knights, fled to the Outer Rim to hide from the depredations of the Empire. In spite of this wide-ranging gossip, or perhaps because of it, Ben Kenobi cut a dashing, mysterious figure to the starved minds of the out-flung desert settlements in which his name was known. He was well-formed, and although shorter than human standard, was still taller than many of the specimens to be found in Tatooine’s slums. He was well-spoken, conscientious, graceful, and learned; he spoke of distant worlds with the familiarity of a spacer and the precision of a Hutt.

In contrast to his day-to-day condition, Kenobi’s arrival on Tatooine had gone entirely unnoticed. He appeared without a ship, emerging from the Mesra Plateau on the back of a mirage; those with keen memories recalled the day when Jawas came into town with news of a CR70 Corellian Corvette landed beyond the outskirts of Mos Eisley, scored with carbon damage and graced with high-speed upgrades. Those with even keener memories (and these, admittedly, were few) would remember it as the _Sundered Heart,_ out of Alderaan, en route from the Subterrel sector. What an Alderaanian corvette was doing on Tatooine was anyone’s guess, but the two individuals who came to the right conclusions quietly decided that the bounty such information was worth was _not_ worth the headache of dealing with the newly-minted Empire. It was this mercy--and the fact that the first died a year later in a shootout, and that the second was slowly rotting his brain on glitteryll--that kept the secret, and with none left who could connect the presence of known anti-Empire politicals to a wasteland hermit, Kenobi remained unmolested by the authorities, both Imperial and criminal.

It was perhaps three years after his arrival on the planet, before the gossip had quite managed to settle down, that Kenobi found himself in the court of Jabba Desilijic Tiure. It began as a matter between two freighters, one of whom was in the Hutt’s employ, and at its root it was a disagreement over whether the other man’s mother had given her favors to a bantha. The Hutt-owned freighter did not survive the reprisals. Ben Kenobi was the sole witness to the event, and with a cargo of spice in the balance, and the survivor claiming it as restitution, Jabba intervened.

Kenobi did not cut as fine a figure in the halls of Jabba’s palace as he did in the Jundland hills. He came as he always did: hooded, dressed in homespun and covered in dust, and against the gilt splendor of excess he appeared very plain, indeed. Jabba was not impressed. Nor was he informed of the particulars of his humble guest; when his majordomo ushered Kenobi forward, he regarded him and said, 

“Da chuda! Who is this fool I see before me?”

“Mighty Jabba,” was Kenobi’s reply, “You are looking at a fool, and I at a thief. May we both be the wiser for it.”

This did not result, contrary to the assumptions of those present, in Kenobi’s disappearance down Jabba’s trap door. Instead, the Hutt laughed, his voice booming through the preternatural quiet of the throne room.

“I knew a Kenobi, once,” he said. “He was bantha poodoo.”

Ben Kenobi bowed, shielding his face as he paid reverence. “There are many Kenobis in the galaxy, Mighty Jabba. I am but one.”

Despite this public and outrageous account, stories of Ben Kenobi’s years in exile (for an exile, indeed, it seemed) were few and far between. He had a skill for appearing and disappearing from recollections that would have been remarked upon, had the remarkers managed to remember.

The ability to avoid unwanted attention, however, did not free Kenobi from the trial by gossip that is the fate of all newcomers to a small community. In his early years he kept close company with a number of local moisture farmers, who, in defiance of the vast distances that separated them, managed to have a grapevine so convoluted as to put Imperial Intelligence to shame; but as time drew on, he separated from these acquaintances and turned increasingly to the empty desert for his company.

The farmer with whom he had been closest, one Owen Lars, who ran a homestead outside Anchorhead, took this seeming abandonment in stride. “He's a crazy old man,” he said to any who inquired, and with a tone that indicated he was not as indifferent as he attempted to seem. “Pay no mind to Ben Kenobi.” Whatever it was that occurred, whether harsh words or foolish deeds, to drive them apart so profoundly, was kept between them; and as neither man cared to speak of the inciting events, the true cause of their rift was lost to time. Speculation ran rampant.

Nine years of Kenobi’s presence, in whatever fashion it was bestowed, was sufficient to quell all wagging tongues. In the manner of dust settling in the wake of a gale, the gossip faded as though it had never arisen in the first place, and Ben Kenobi, while still not “one of them,” was relegated to the status of neighbor and local oddity.

Years passed--nineteen, to be exact--and even that recollection of Ben Kenobi faded, bleached by the desert into the grayness of age. Tatooine forgot him; Tatooine took him into its embrace.

 

II. The Desert Does Not Share

The birth of a planet is a curious thing; the birth of a life-giving planet, even more so. In the eons before the galaxy as we know it was formed, a nebula on the edge of an oxygen- and hydrogen-dense stellar nursery began its steady spiral through the void. If this nursery had been dense with other gases, say neon or argon, our galaxy would have been very different indeed; but it was hydrogen and oxygen that littered the molecular cloud, as well as a sizable portion of nitrogen, and it was this quirk of fate that allowed Tatooine--and indeed, the galaxy--to become what it was.

From the very beginning, the question of life in the Tatoo system was fraught. As the nebula contracted in on itself, it formed not one but two stars: a binary system, with twice the radiation, twice the gravitational stresses, and twice the paucity of atmospheric gases to bestow on its planetary children. At any point in the multi-billion-year history of Tatoo I and II, any number of events could have occurred--an inopportune solar flare, a misalignment of the dust in the protoplanetary disc--that would have spelled the end for Tatooine, and life would never have evolved. But good fortune held, and as the eons drifted by and the nascent stars collected their due, the remainder spread out in a disc of gas, ice, and rock to begin the slow march toward planetary formation.

An infinity of years passed in this manner. The planetesimals gathered in size and density, sinking into the fabric of gravity as their constituent elements packed in on each other. The pull of their binary hub drew them into fixed orbits; their relative position in the cloud determined the quantity of gases available for them to collect. Occasionally paths intersected, and the violent tumults of these mergers formed larger planets--or more debris. Tatooine settled itself as the second planet in the Tatoo system and the third smallest; it withstood meteor strikes and interplanetary collisions with a geologic shrug of indifference. Mica, feldspar, schist, quartz; these were the minerals it gathered to itself. Iron, aluminum, zinc, titanium; these were its metals. It gobbled the atmosphere left to it by its stars and its siblings, and it happened upon a fortuitous ratio of nitrogen, oxygen, and argon, as well as trace amounts of carbon dioxide, neon, and methane. What it lacked was appreciable hydrogen, and this alone saved Tatooine’s future as a life-giver: a thin layer of ice, gathered as it passed through the cloud of a comet collision, fused itself to the surface. A paltry polar cap remained, and some soaked into the earth; but the rest, vaporized by the heat of the suns, began the weak march of Tatooine’s water cycle. Morning dew, and the curious vapors borne up from the union of sand and cliff, were the only rain Tatooine would ever see.

It was enough. Millennia passed; Tatooine endured the upheavals of lunar formation. Ghomrassen and Guermessa, in particular, are significant to this story: originally one singular dwarf planet, the unfortunate trajectory of their orbit brought them into Tatooine. They collided in a cataclysm that beggars comprehension. Tatooine survived, though its spin was irrevocably altered. The shattered halves of the dwarf planet fell into orbit around the wounded giant, and the debris formed a third, final moon: Chenini. And Tatooine, alone of all the planets in the Tatoo System, spun retrograde, and at a rate slow enough that coriolis winds wouldn’t strip life from its surface.

But the true miracle of the cataclysm, beyond even the above, was the scar it left upon Tatooine’s northern hemisphere: for the dwarf planet was rich in water, in the form of high-salinity ice, and this it left behind, in a vast swath that stretched from what is now Mos Eisley east to the Dune Sea, and south to Mos Medchien, at the edge of the habitable zone. To this day the remnant moons remain water-rich, and ice mining has become a valuable industry, but before space travel came to the Arkanis sector--indeed, before life at all formed on Tatooine--the impact of these two titans left on Tatooine an enormous quantity of ice. It was not Tatooine’s first source of water, but it was by far the greatest; and upon the suns-baked shores of the shallow sea that formed as the ice melted, buried in the mud, a bacterial soup thickened, becoming, in time, the nursery of Tatooine’s life.

It was a fleeting paradise. Water cannot last in a desert, and the incubator that permitted life to blossom dried up with the mud flats. The sea evaporated, slowed by the bitter cold of desert nights, and the produced the Great Chott Salt Flat. Settlers who came to the punishing salt pans found the imprinted fossils of fish and wondered.

Once again, a slender twist of improbable fate--some would call it the will of the Force--ensured that Tatooine would carry life.

And what life it was. Not only did the bare minimum of bacteria and microorganisms spring up, but a wealth of desert-hardy plants joined them: pallies and black melons, hubba gourds and deb-deb, the fruit of many an alcoholic drink. Tatooine trees and razor moss, desert sage and poonten grass; yes, Tatooine was generous, if one knew where to look. And it was this life that supported the evolution of not one, but two intelligent life-forms. Jawas and Tuskens were not as ferociously expansionist as Humans, nor gifted with the business acumen of the Hutts who ruled them; they were humble species, but all the more remarkable for the simple reason that they developed in an environment hell-bent on killing them.

For Tatooine was not gentle, and it was not merciful. It was the pinnacle of a desert biome, with all the thorns, heat, and scarcity that implied. It was not enough merely to husband black melons for their water; one had to make sure they did not strip all nutrients from the precious little arable land that could be found. One could not simply raise banthas; one had to migrate, to ensure they did not forage the roots from the plants they ate. Barren soil and destroyed plant systems could not be depended upon to replenish themselves in a desert as severe as Tatooine. Every native was an ecologist by necessity.

The planet’s iron hold loosened over the course of millennia, with the advent of newer technologies. Hydroponics ensured gardens would thrive independent of poor soil. Vaporators and ice mining provided an unheard-of degree of water security. Mines for metals and rock flourished and sank. Shipping lines foundered due to unprofitable distance and lack of commerce. Gangsters and outlaws thrived. The desert was moderated--but her jaws remained ready to snap shut on the unwary.

It was into this wilderness that Ben Kenobi walked. Water available only from the morning dew, collected into vaporators or from moisture-hoarding plants. Predators evolved, as the krayt dragon was, to feed off the blood of others. Sentients that stripped you of your valuables--whether your scrap or your life. It was in the heart of this crucible that Ben Kenobi made his home. 

 

III. A Stranger Comes to Anchorhead

Anchorhead Township was a village some 80 kilometers south of Mos Eisley, on the border of Great Chott. Its population fluctuated throughout the year--less during the dry season, when vaporator output halved; more in the harvest season, when hired hands came looking for work and drovers used it as a stopover before moving on to browse their herds on the grassy tufts of Jawa Heights--but it kept a steady base of about 700 people.

It was dry season, now, and there was only one herd drowsing in the paddocks by the market field. They were eopies: sturdy, long-legged, with ungainly proportions and comical, drooping snouts. A young woman of thirty moved between them, gentling and scolding as need arose, and although she was weatherbeaten into premature middle age, not even the force of Tatooine’s suns could drain the strength from her hands, or the suppleness from her stride, or the casual confidence with which she handled her beasts. She stood tall, her once-brown hair turned to platinum beneath the suns, her eyes a faded blue and framed by a cracked-glaze web of wrinkles. She wore a broad-brimmed hat, stained and slouchy from hard use, bleached into an indefinable gray; about her whipcord waist was a belt of sturdy bantha leather, well-tended and filled with every manner of loop and hook as could be fitted. A lasso of braided leather hung over her left hip; on her right, a sand-sealed Naboo S-5 heavy blaster, the chromium finish on the scopes long worn away. She had come to Anchorhead with the intention of selling one of her calves to the Darklighters. What she found was a stranger in a cloak the color of dried blood, who had a burning need to buy her smartest saddle-broken girl.

The eopie’s name was Rooh. She was old and slow, but her feet were steady, and she didn’t shy at the distant fluting of krayts. Mikhasee Quickrock didn’t want to sell her.

Mikhasee was Human, and a drover by trade; she had been born to moisture farmers a few leagues south of Mos Taike, and to their disappointment, had not had the heart for vaporators. “Mikhasee-moonchild,” her mother used to say to her in dismay, “Who will care for the farm when we grow old?” Her mother’s chassa had been the best chassa; Mikhasee could still remember it, all these years away. Her father never spoke much, but he had a love for opera that he instilled in his daughter. She had seen him cry only twice in her life: once when Fluffy, their best bantha, was killed by a logra, and once while listening to the aria “Yaaarth k’dani” from the Bith opera _Sfemme._

The question of who would take care of the farm, and her family, was made moot when Mikhasee turned thirteen years old and went to visit her grandfather in Mos Espa. When she returned, she found her parents dead and their water gone, both taken by Tuskens.

She sold the farm, and her grandfather put the funds in a trust for when she would need it. She was an indifferent student, frequently truant and always angry. The first time she knew peace was when she joined a livestock husbandry program set in place by her secondary school as a funnel into trade school. Banthas were slow, patient giants, and eopies needed steady hearts to counter their stubbornness; they soothed Mikhasee Quickrock from the heights of her grief and brought her solace in the darkness that followed. She bought her first herd with her trust money.

She considered dewbacks for a time, and they were a good investment--she would have had a steady trade with the Imperial Garrison in Bestine--but they weren’t herd animals, and generally hated traveling the way Mikhasee needed them to. Rontos came next, but the financial demands of keeping them watered, while not insurmountable, failed to bear profit when she factored in competition from the superior bloodlines of the Jawas. It was at last with eopies that she found a successful model. She bought a small herd at the livestock fair in Motesta Oasis and began to follow the fodder, into the hills during the dry season, and down to the flats when the springs flowed. It was this decision, and her ensuing success as a drover, that brings her to relevance in our story.

“You be a good one for Ben, here,” she said to Rooh. “No fussing or rearing or snotting on him. You can fart, though. That’s always funny.”

“Why a drover?” Ben had asked as she saddled the eopie for him. “Why not a rancher, or a breeder? There seems no profit in constantly moving your stock, and no small amount of loss.”

Mikhasee gave him a look of supreme incredulity. “Do you see many ranches on Tatooine? Do you see many stockyards? Such things are luxuries for fat worlds. Fodder is precious. Industrialized agriculture has no toehold, here; there is not enough water and not enough demand. ‘Yes, but the sand,’ you say. ‘The sand damages speeders and hoverskiffs every day! Livestock will always be in demand!’ Let me say: there aren't enough people on the whole of Tatooine to support one large-scale ranch like what they keep on Arkanis. The only fixed operations you see are small-scale, run by one or two people. The Sand People are different, but then, they move around. Well, so do I! I can't abide staying in one place; it makes me itch. I migrate to keep sane, and my eopies are the sturdiest and the smartest for it. And it lets me do my small part to keep this rock alive. Fodder! That is the paramount concern of any husbander. There’s not a place on this rock can sustain a herd for long without turning out even more desert; I keep them moving to keep them living. You say, ‘be a rancher! Be a breeder!’ I say I am both. The length and breadth of Tatooine is my range, and the sheltered hill caves are my nursery. I go from town to town with my herd, and my herd doesn't clear the town out of fodder. Have you ever seen an eopie at fresh grass? They’ll tear it up from the roots and leave naught but sand if you let them. That’s why they’ve got bags over their snouts, to keep them from eating when they oughtn’t. Banthas, now, they’re easier. They eat more, but they’re smarter, and don’t always strip the land. You can get more money for a bantha, too.”

“Then why don’t you sell banthas?”

“Sand People steal them when their herds need new blood,” Mikhasee replied, and that was all she would say on the matter.

There was something odd about this offworlder, Mikhasee decided. Not that he had come to Tatooine, which was not unusual in and of itself, but those sorts were generally spacers: rough, untutored folk, not genteel-sounding the way this one was. He called her “ma’am” and didn’t look at her tits once.

The mystery only grew more impenetrable when a faint cry sounded from beneath his cloak. She had thought it was a bundle of weapons, or maybe supplies kept close to the chest; instead, Ben pulled out a baby. Who would would bring a baby to Tatooine, who had any other choice?

“Hush now, little one,” he said gently. A pang went through Mikhasee, and though her own parents had been dead and gone for nearly seventeen years, the sight of parenthood in others, let alone so tenderly shown--and against the backdrop of such bereavement as she saw on Ben’s face--made her eyes sting and her lips curve downward with lingering bitterness. She refused to let herself hold it against him. It was clear he had lost someone incomparable.

She didn’t give him a discount, though. And when he rode out of town toward the setting suns, she didn’t remember him, either.

 

IV. The Household of a Desert Hermit

Ben Kenobi established himself in the abandoned hut of one Keedassa Rai, a Sorrusian moisture prospector who died in a rockfall three years before Kenobi came to Tatooine. The vaporator, though sandblasted and scavenged, was a relatively sturdy GX-8 model, and once restored, it was more than sufficient for his needs, providing enough surplus that he was able to sell it once a month and live off the proceeds.

The hut itself was thick-walled synstone, built in the Tatooine manner, to keep out the heat of the day and to insulate against the chill of the night. Inside, it had two rooms, the larger for living, sleeping, and eating, and a small ‘fresher tucked discreetly away. There was also a cellar, born of a fortuitous crevice, that had been widened for use. It was a home both humble and austere. The site upon which it had been built was remote to the point of isolation: it perched on an escarpment near the border of the Jundland Wastes, where they plunged into the broad sweep of the Gordan Plain; the closest settlement was the Pika Oasis, 50 kilometers away. At the time he moved in, the hut had been reclaimed by the desert: miniature dunes had drifted in the corners, and the ‘fresher had been colonized by a family of womp rats. Two weeks of careful cleaning brought the hut to an acceptable standard, although he was obliged to drive off a mated pair of krayt dragons after they found the rat carcasses. They had been unwilling to part with such easy offerings; Kenobi gained a scar on his leg and a feverish week in bed from their bite.

The surrounding desert made every effort to repel his habitation. It was the nature of Tatooine to repel, and where it came into contact with Ben Kenobi, it showed itself to its utmost.

To this hut he brought with him only the essentials for survival: a spare set of robes; food rations to last a month; three days of water; three thousand Imperial credits and one thousand local wupiupi; a collapsible, low-yield model TX1-12 vaporator; goggles; a medkit; a scarf to wrap around his nose and mouth; a battered set of battle armor; a jerba skin rug; a survival tent; a datapad; a desert poncho, much worn and slightly too large; fodder for Rooh; her tack; a lightweight combination heater/stove/lantern; three power packs; a variety of kyber crystals, diatium power cells, cylindrical cases ground from alusteel and titanium, emitter plates, and accompanying tools; and an emergency survival belt kit, which included emergency rations, a comlink, a fibercord grappling hook, a holoprojector, a glowrod, a rebreather, and a single charm, as large as his thumb, carved from a snippet of japor wood.

He also carried two lightsabers at his belt. This in and of itself was not unusual; many lightsabers had been recovered in the aftermath of the Clone Wars, and as far as weapons went, there were worse choices for the desert.

His first year was spent carving out a space for himself in his new home. There was a frenetic edge to his busyness, one that abhorred silence and stillness. He scrubbed the walls and limed them white; he hauled a power generator, a composting toilet, a stove, conservator, a space heater, and replacement parts for the ventilation system and vaporator out from Pika over the course of three weeks, and spent the next two months installing them, all the while cursing and throwing tools in frustration. The vaporator especially gave him a great deal of trouble, even with the patch-in droid to translate from binary. More than once he said aloud, although there was no one but the droid to hear, “It’s too hard without you.”

“I am here to assist,” the droid replied tinnily.

These times, Kenobi would invariably sit back on his heels, or lean against the vaporator, and experience some extreme of emotion that went beyond the human ability to express. These times, Kenobi seemed to grow older and more bent with every breath that left him.

His household expenses were modest, in keeping with his modest living. Once the initial cost of refurbishing the hut was met and the vaporator began providing him surplus water, he received a monthly income of about 1,350 credits (2,094 wupiupi). His budget during Year 13 looked something like this: 

_Monthly Expense Budget_  
Food: 120C/w186  
Replacement parts: 300C/w465  
Bribes: 150/w234  
Tolls: 90C/w141  
Offworld supplies: 75C/w117  
Shipping fees: 90C/w141  
Power packs: 54C/w84  
New clothes: 60C/w93  
Miscellaneous: 150C/w234  
Remainder: 261C/w405

He saved the remainder for moments of unusual need, such as when the Doruthers lost a vaporator to a rockfall and couldn't afford a replacement.

A general overview of his day went thus: it began before sunrise, often with Kenobi waking from troubled sleep. He would perform katas to maintain strength and awareness upon rising. He ate breakfast on foot, as the suns rose; work on the vaporator was always done before the heat of the day. He collected the mushrooms that bloomed on the condenser, then siphoned the storage tanks. Water was stored in the cellar, where he also kept the power generator. Then he began the task of cleaning the hut, a never-ending battle against the desert sand that fought to clog every vent it could find.

By this time it would be mid-morning. Kenobi would then begin the most notable portion of his day: he would go on patrol. In early days, when he was uncertain of the terrain, he would wear his battle armor beneath his cloak, the better to defend himself from his hostile neighbors; as years passed, they and he became known to each other, and more tellingly, Kenobi found an inner well of confidence that had been stripped from him. The older he grew, the less he worried if there was a blaster aimed between his shoulders--or perhaps, the less he cared. He left the armor at home.

The route he took varied from day to day, but always circled the cliff upon which his hut stood. Before Rooh died, he would ride her; in the later years of his exile, he went by foot. The full circuit would take him between two and three hours to complete; the midday meal he ate while on patrol. The path he chose most frequently began along the bluff, where he sighted the valley for anything unusual. “Unusual,” of course, was a broad term; better to say he marked the routes taken by the Jawa sandcrawlers, and the locations of bantha forage the Tuskens hoarded, and watched the flurry that arose when the Settler’s Call sounded. Occasionally he would make the trek up to Beggar’s Canyon to catch a podrace, or to espy the young offspring of the moisture farmers as they raced their cobbled-together hotrods, daring each other to new heights of risk. The days a particular youth flew, threading the needle with careless ease, Kenobi watched with his heart in his throat, and his lightsaber dragged ominously at his belt--a solution to a question he wasn't sure how to answer.

Most days carried him past the krayt nesting grounds. In the dry season it was little more than a twisting slot canyon filled with scratched-out hollows, empty and waiting; but when the mating cries of the common krayt echoed through Jundland’s crags, the nesting ground transformed into a river of writhing scales and fluting roars. Kenobi learned to mimic these roars, as well as most others the dragons made. When they died, he followed them to their burial ground and gathered the pearls from their stomachs, which he recut for use as lightsaber focusing crystals. There were stretches of time in which the only meaningful contact he had with another lifeform was with the krayts of Tatooine, and the single happiest day of his exile was the day a krayt nestling tumbled up to his hiding place and proceeded to crawl all over him while its mother looked on.

One aspect of his patrols which did not vary was his dedication to physical training. Lifting stones, vaulting crevasses, feats of endurance where he stood in a handstand for hours at a time; all these he did and more, disregarding as far as he could the advance of age. Lightsaber forms, too, he practiced, and neatly halved pebbles and rocks grew common in the Jundland canyons around his home.

Afternoons offered a time to rest from the oppressive heat. Most days Kenobi would read and add to his slowly-building library. Other days, he would tinker with his tools, refining lightsaber construction. The evening meal would follow, and it was often the only one that Kenobi ate warm and while sitting down.

He would meditate for an hour before retiring. At first, in an attempt to keep with old practice, he meditated before the spare lightsaber hilt he carried, that he might remind himself of the inevitability of death and to release himself from its pain; it took him many months before he realized how futile an exercise it was with such a focus, and longer still before he could bring himself to store the hilt in an old chest, where he could sometimes manage to forget about it.

When he had meditated, he would sleep. It rarely came easily. He grew accustomed to less.

Three days a month he set aside to ride--and later, walk, beside a hoversled procured from the Jawas--to the oasis for supplies. During the first five years of his stay, he would make a wide circle to the southeast on his return trip to the visit the Lars moisture farm. Even before their falling-out he was given a surly welcome there, as Kenobi was an unwelcome intrusion and an even less welcome reminder. The particulars of their association, while relevant to this story, will be retold later, and will therefore not be addressed here; suffice it to say, the month after Kenobi’s fifth year on Tatooine he was barred from returning, and while he continued to swing toward the south and east after his supply runs, from then on he observed the Lars farm from afar, and did not attempt to encroach upon their hospitality. 

It was a quiet, monotonous life, and from the outside (for that is the closest Kenobi permitted anyone to approach), it seemed to become its owner well.

 

V. The Quartermaster’s Say

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the peculiar shadows Kenobi cast, even in the years past his assimilation into the fabric of the community, might be to glimpse a holo the quartermaster at Pika Oasis (a Rodian named Pordeep, who had taken control of the Claim in the wake of the Gault Affair) sent to his sister in Arnthout:

“Good sister, it has been many months. I revel in the holos you send of my nieces; they are growing strong! Bassie will become a formidable singer, and Toshka a fine engineer. Tell them I have a surprise waiting, when next you visit.

“This week has been much like the weeks previous. It is easy to fall into a routine; easy for a routine to become a rut. I can hear our mother saying not to let our footsoles grow moss. She was a driven woman. I feel a little of myself settling into the store as time passes, and I understand a little better, why our father did not follow her. It is good, to have a home. To have stability.

“Last month I told you we had found a new mechanic willing to take over the speeder bays. I did not tell you what happened after I sent the message! It is a formidable story. This mechanic, who is named Ade’vamarr, was trained in the Bestine IV shipyards and emigrated to Tatooine when the government cancelled a long-standing contract, and the crew was forced to downsize. He is a good businessman and excellent with customers. I suspect he will be an asset to the Claim.

“The same cannot be said of the being whom I hired to manage the dewbacks. I am uncertain why the Claim’s previous owner decided to husband dewbacks in the first place; they are restive, expensive, and for our purposes, do not bring much profit. I am considering selling them off and putting the proceeds into improving the vaporators and moisture reclamation vents. But the drover I hired. They are a useless individual. They are a symbiote from the Tyrenian Sector by the name of Janss, and they have no idea what they are doing. It is deeply frustrating. The other day--and this is the formidable story I mentioned--this Janss allowed a dewback to break through the fence and to rampage through the meeting field. It was an off-hour, let us be glad, so there were no beings about; but several speeders were at rest, and this dewback, who was in rut, attempted to mate with one. This was so amusing a sight I cannot begin to do it justice. I laughed heartily, dear sister. The speeder proved insufficient for this frustrated dewback, and it managed to find its way to the general store. It did not fit through the door, for which your brother is thankful, but it wedged in its head and snorted and roared most loudly. This was not as funny.

“I was prepared then to greet my ancestors. But then, through the combined efforts of our mechanic and a desert stranger, the dewback was calmed enough to be sedated. Janss was asleep in the barn, and so could not assist. Rather, Adeva chose for them not to assist. This was probably wise.

“But--and I think, on further reflection, this is why I wished to send a message. This desert stranger I mentioned. He is a regular at the oasis: he shows up once every month or two for provisioning. Occasionally he has ridden in on Jawa sandcrawlers, and is known both for this bizarre predilection--you know how foul Jawas smell--and for his hand in the Gault Affair. I'm not sure the precise nature of his involvement; there are rumors that he lives with Tusken Raiders, and that this is the reason they attack the Claim so rarely, now. I had discounted those rumors, but upon speaking with this man (he is a human, about my height, with one of those hair growths over his face), I am willing to entertain the possibility. He had a dignified bearing, overlaying a deep well of sorrow, or something similarly dark. Not dangerous, I think, but not everyone survived the wars unscathed. He is like our uncle: wounded where no eye can see. But in truth, he made me nervous. He approached the dewback as though it was no danger to him. I do not mean he had a death wish; I have seen such people, and you can see in their eyes that they consider themselves already dead. This man was not one. You remember when our mother took us camping on Rodia, and a windstorm rose and we had to shelter in a cave, and Mother showed us how to light a fire? And then how to bank the coals so they would not die in the night, but stay warm? This man was like a banked fire. There was a stillness about him, but with a heat beneath, contained. This aura was so pronounced that it brought many of my own memories to the fore, such as those of Lucca and Pasheed. I miss them.

“But enough of that. We managed to corral the beast, happily. Adeva roped it like the legends of the Soammei Rangers, very bravely. But Janss is not long for this establishment, and I think the dewbacks will leave when they go. I do not pass time slandering those who are not present, but the previous owner of the Claim, peaceful may her travels be, kept far too many pallies in her basket.

“And so I record this message, dear sister. I had hoped it would ease the melancholy that has come over me, but it is more potent than a simple hologram can banish. Do not fear--the bottles of brandy are safe. Those days are behind me. But I find the sweeter memories of my family are more present than usual, and they pang more deeply. I do not think I will engage Old Man Ben in conversation again for a good long time.

“Give my love to Greedo and the girls.”

 

VI. Difficult Neighbors

The Tusken tribes of Tatooine could be divided into two groups: those that tolerated outsiders, and those that did not. Those that did browsed their herds near the cities and towns, and rarely, if ever, led raids upon them, though they weren't so expansive as to consider them equal sentients. Those that did not were far more common, and another story entirely.

Once or twice a month there was word of another theft, perhaps against a moisture farm, perhaps against a trade outpost or power station. Most were relatively minor: a damaged vaporator, a bantha vanished in the night, occasionally a stolen rifle or knife. Every three to five years or so there was a larger raid against a settlement--usually repelled, but rarely without casualties. The cries of the Mothers of Bestine and the Curtain Wall survivors could be heard every Midyear, and meanwhile the sale of insurance bonds for Tusken attacks kept up a steady business amongst moisture farmers.

Jawas, too, were not without their hazards, and they, too, could be divided into those who were honest, and scavenged and resold fairly, and those who cheated their customers. While Jawas were scrupulous amongst themselves in maintaining their integrity and frequently punished wrongdoers, there was next to no recourse for an offworlder who sought restitution for a bad purchase. Jawas, no matter how much they valued their good reputation as merchants, always valued their own more than they did any offworlder. Thus it came to be that the local parlance for getting a bad deal was called “getting jawed.”

Yet the most dangerous tribe, far more than Tuskens or Jawas (for those peoples, at least, were consistent in their crimes), or even the Hutts, who were despotic and cruel to all without preference, were the Humans who settled in every corner and crevice and shadow on Tatooine’s pitted crust.

Humans, indeed, could be said to be the most successful species in the galaxy. Rivaled only by bacteria, viruses, and insects in their colonizing scope, they showed a degree of changeability that defied classification. Their crimes were hidden by a mask of omnipresence, and with the Empire--and Human High Culture--ascendant, they were granted leniency by institutionalized privilege.

A Jawa could be crooked or straight, but would always be presumed the former; a Human would always be assumed the latter. Such were the edicts of Empire.

This did not stop the Jawas from regularly pilfering Kenobi’s patch-in droid, or Tuskens from stealing the water in his vaporator storage compartment whenever they overcame their superstitious fear of the Human witch. And it certainly didn't stop the Human bandits who roamed the wastes from charging tolls at gunpoint, or the Human bureaucrats from demanding bribes on top of the cost of re-licensing himself as a water-seller, Class D (under 10 decaliters per month).

 

VII. A Collection of Walking Sticks

Over the course of his stay on Tatooine, Ben Kenobi found himself, as previously mentioned, at the mercy of a number of disreputable persons, some of whom had the advantage of him and some who did not; and it was only through the application of sharp wits and a certain unscrupulousness that he was able to extract himself.

One such encounter, more innocent than most, occurred in the ravine called Hanter’s Gorge, a basalt-strewn coulee guarded by a thicket of formations that looked like nothing so much as bared teeth. It had become to the Tuskens haunted ground, a place of mourning, due to a slaughter a handful of years earlier; Kenobi went there with utmost caution if he went there at all, for even now it was common to stumble across the bereaved, and they were frequently violent. Indeed, on this occasion he would not have gone at all had it not been for the herd of wild banthas he was tracking, for the sake of boredom and curiosity. They led him into Hanter’s jagged mouth, and a Tusken youth, not old enough to have attempted his adulthood trials, chased him back out.

Occasions of trespass aside, where Kenobi was in the wrong as well as at a disadvantage, the fruit of these encounters often resulted in one or more weapons left in Kenobi’s keeping. It was with no small sense of irony, for Kenobi was, at heart, a peace-loving man, that he set them aside, out of reach of further malefactors, in an impromptu and unasked-for collection.

Had there been anyone to remark upon them, Kenobi might have called them an old man’s walking sticks, and said that he never returned home without one.

Gaffi sticks, blasters, slugthrowers; rifles, pistols, clubs; knives, razorwire, machetes, vibroblades, and one particularly nasty concussion/shrapnel grenade. These he kept in a jumble in the furthest corner of his cellar, between the power generator and an abandoned spider nest he kept meaning to clean out.

 

VIII. The Crisis of the Children

In Year 11, a conflict arose between the Tuskens of Clan Ee’arrghuOe and the Jawas of Clan Kiluyak Bopom Kova that escalated to bloodshed.

The majority of Tatooine’s colonists, Human and otherwise, who knew of the conflict were content to leave them be; as far as most were concerned, the galaxy would not miss a few less of either. Ben Kenobi, whose hut sat on the edge of the warring clans’ territories, felt otherwise. The third time he came across the fly-blown corpses of Jawas on his patrols he went home and packed for an expedition.

The fortress of Clan Kiluyak Bopom Kova was buried in a cliff deep in the Mospic High Range. From this base, they sent out sandcrawlers across the Gordan Plains and Northern Dune Sea. Theirs was the strongest clan of Jawas this side of Bestine. Their resources were considerable. Their traders held the most contracts; their shamans, the most daring and the best-trained. None had better rontos.

Kenobi was welcomed among them as an honored guest, for he had for many years been a favored trading partner, always willing to part with a few liters of water for uncommonly good prices. More than once he had procured transport with them, after Rooh grew too old for the hardships of regular journeying. He was ushered before the chief Jawa, one with whom Kenobi had treated before, and whose ascendancy he had witnessed a year previous, during the k'tni storm season. He was plied with spiced squill and flatbread with honey; a carafe of water was set beside them, and they reclined upon poonten rugs and imported--and, Kenobi had no doubt, “salvaged”--silk pillows.

“M’um m’aloo,” Chief Issa said, in Trade Speak so the offworlder could understand. “It is good you are here.”

“It is?” Kenobi asked, surprised.

“Yes,” Issa replied. “We need your help.”

Kenobi was silent for a time, his eyes downcast as he considered. He said, “What service do you think I can provide?”

“You know the Sand People. You can ask them to stop their crimes against our people.”

“What have they done?” 

“They take our children. Already we have lost a dozen young ones. And now, that is not enough--they kill our traders, as well. Is no sandcrawler sacred to them!” He then began to list the particular injuries committed, to Kenobi’s increasing dismay.

“Grave news, indeed,” Kenobi said, brushing a hand down his graying beard. “I know certain members of Clan Uuurrogheii, perhaps they have knowledge which can shed light upon these disturbing events.”

“The Jawas of Clan Kiluyak Bopom Kova give their thanks,” Chief Issa said. “Go, and may the Eyes watch over you.”

Kenobi went down from the mountains by a jerba track that wended through upthrusting granite stones. It overlooked the plains; like the Sage Odan-Urr, Kenobi found himself marveling at the vista, and at the way so grand a sight as “when the horizon stretches to meet the sky at the corner of infinity,” could conspire to make a being feel so small and so large at once. It took him a day to reach the flatlands. He sheltered that night with a herd of wild banthas, in a shallow dell ringed with cacta bushes. They shifted and lowed when he joined them, but he kept to himself and didn't stray too close to their calves. By the time full dark had settled, they had decided him a perfectly polite, unsociable guest, and proceeded to ignore him in turn. Kenobi rolled himself in his cloak and awaited dawn.

It came slowly. Tatooine’s habitable zone, set high in the northern hemisphere as it was, suffered lengthy twilight hours, victim both of the planet’s modest axial tilt and its twin sunrises; moreover, Tatooine bore an unusual concentration of dust in its upper atmosphere, the legacy of its ferocious sandstorms, and this allowed light to be refracted to the lower atmosphere far earlier than on other planets. Kenobi watched for a full two local hours as the sky lightened from black to midnight blue, to a cascade of mauve and lavender and indigo before the banthas lowed and raised themselves from their scrapes. A faint mist had arisen, gentle and cool on the skin; Kenobi moistened his lips and mouth with the dew gathered on the cacta leaves.

By first rise he had gathered up his small camp and made his way across the Gordan Plain. Where the first day’s trek had been a meditation on the magnificence and grandeur of the natural world, this day’s trek was a meditation on patience and the amelioration of boredom. The valley was neither as broad nor as featureless as the Dune Seas, but there was little beyond hard-packed dirt, stones, and the odd, creaking bush to stimulate the eye. Gone were the richly-colored strata that revealed themselves in the mountains; present was the dun soil of the open desert. He was two-thirds of the way across, on the straightaway between Pika Oasis and Bestine, when evening fell. He did not take shelter this night, for there was none to be had; he scratched out a nest for himself from the dust, as the banthas had the night before, and laid himself once more in the shelter of his cloak. Above, the bowl of the heavens curved around him, the milky spill of stars shelter enough, and he whispered to himself the litany of new constellations, and picked out the planets of the Arkanis sector. He fell asleep beneath star- and moon-glow, the world washed silver and clean, and his dreams were empty and smooth as the desert.

Kenobi pressed the pace, and by mid-morning the next day he found himself back in Jundland, descending into the Roiya Rift, which was called the Pillars. When he reached a certain small fresh-water spring, he left a cairn and went to wait in the deep shadows beneath the formations.

The Pillars, countless weathered shafts of sandstone keeping watch over their labyrinthine valley, were a haven for those who wished not to be found. Springs riddled the bedrock; some little more than damp mudpits, some foul, some sweet and clear. Kenobi did not know them all, for it was not his place to: he was in Tusken Raider territory, now. He knew enough to get from point to point, and the point he sought now was the summoning spring for A’Yark.

Kenobi caught the red flicker of A’Yark’s eyepiece before he saw the warrior. The sun glinted, and the eyepiece flashed; blended as A’Yark was by sand-colored wrappings into the desert, and given the canny nature of this particular acquaintance, Kenobi could only assume he was meant to see.

“Hello, there,” Kenobi called out.

The only reply was a fall of rock, overloud in the silence at the roots of the Pillars.

“I come from the Jawas,” he said. “Their children are gone and their elders dead.” He kept his speech simple, that A’Yark might understand. Tuskens rarely stooped to learn Basic, the language of the offworlders, preferring to cleave to their own guttural tongue; but A’Yark had, and while philosophical debate was beyond both of them in either language, it was enough for communication.

A boulder detached itself from the cliff face, and Kenobi watched as it resolved into a fully-grown Tusken Raider. Every Tusken went wrapped, the better to protect themselves and hide from prying eyes; A’Yark, the fiercest Tusken Kenobi had met, bore wrappings tied in the patterns of a clan war chief. Only once in the history of Clan Uuurrogheii had the wrappings of a war chief been bestowed, and while Kenobi recognized that Tusken history was oral and did not span much further back than three or four generations, this was a formidable accomplishment for a warrior.

Besides, he had had dealings with A’Yark before. He knew the ferocity of such a warrior, when need arose; it was a ferocity he himself shared, though he no longer wore it for all to see. This warrior, nobly-wrapped and well-armed with a polished 6-2Aug2 hunting rifle, had no compunctions. A’Yark was proud. The warrior stood tall, taller than Kenobi, but walked with a gait that suggested a stiff knee, and when seated, set aside the rifle with hands that were beginning to warp with arthritis.

“A’Yark,” Kenobi said.

“Ke-noh-bee,” A’Yark replied. “The little cowards are dying?” It was not used as an insult; “little coward” was the direct translation from Tusken for “Jawa,” Kenobi had learned. The word for human was “small thief,” compared to “big thief” for the Hutts; there were a dozen similar monikers the Tuskens had felt moved to give the infinite species that counted as “other,” and all carried a xenophobic disdain that was remarkable in its scope.

“They are being killed,” Kenobi corrected. “And their children stolen.”

A’Yark, already motionless, nevertheless managed to convey a sense of increased stillness, as of a wild animal espying an unknown threat. “What happen? Tell.”

“Three moons past, Trade Elder Mampak brought three children--apprentices, almost adults--from the clan fortress to a salvage near Mos Espa. Mampak was found shot, and the children missing. Two moons past, two children were playing near their family’s sandcrawler. They went over a hill and disappeared from sight. When it came time to leave, their family could not find them.” Kenobi took a sip of water. “One moon past, four adult traders were found on the Xelric draw, their throats cut and their blood collected, in the Tusken fashion. Two more children disappeared a week later, also from their sandcrawler. This moon, four attacks by Clan Ee’arrghuOe on Jawa sandcrawlers, and one against the fortress. Six children were taken from the refugee parties, all at night, all without signs of a struggle.” He opened his hand palm-down to indicate he was through speaking.

A’Yark listened, then sat back. “Why you are summoning me?”

“I don’t know Clan Ee’arrghuOe. I had hoped you might ask for me why they are attacking the Jawas, and if they know anything about the disappearances of thirteen Jawa children.”

A’Yark’s manner was impassive. “I tell you things. You listen.”

“Of course.”

“Two moons past. Gherk’epa, son of my sister-daughter, not yet man, go away. Diss-ah-peer, you say. He is Clan Ee’arrghuOe, his father Clan Ee’arrghuOe. Jawas move over forbidden land. Tuskens kill Jawas. One moons past. Four Tuskens on adulthood trials diss-ah-peer. No krayt-sign. No bodies. Gone. Jawas go again in forbidden land. Clan Ee’arrghuOe take wound-right and kill Jawas. Chief Ee’arrghuOe say, ‘Jawas take young and sell to meat-stores in offworlder stone villages.’ This moons: Clan Ee’arrghuOe claim wound-right and attack Jawa clan. Two young, very young, disappear from war camp at suns-fall. Mothers and fathers cry for their babies. I hear this.” A’Yark opened a hand, palm down.

Kenobi stared at A’Yark. “You're both losing children,” he murmured.

A’Yark nodded. “Young-stealing. Jawas get young-stealing, too?”

“Yes. They are suffering as you are; I suspect they went on forbidden land to find their own children.” He sighed. “This speaks more of a kidnapping ring. If you will tell Clan Ee’arrghuOe to stop killing Jawas, I will tell Clan Kiluyak Bopom Kova to stop trespassing.”

“I do this.” With no more words than that, A’Yark stood from the meeting spring and disappeared into the wilderness. Kenobi contemplated the dark water of the pool for a while longer, tarrying beneath the shadows of the Pillars. Eventually, he slipped into meditation.

The mysteries of the Force are deep and vast. A being can spend a lifetime - a hundred lifetimes - studying them, and still emerge as raw and unknowledgeable as a youngling. Kenobi was no great Force scholar, nor a philosopher, to tease out its contradictions; he was a humbler man than that, a mere student of its ways; but as he sat beside the spring, drifting along the pathways of life and possibility around him, a vision came slinking up to him, furtive and jagged. A hand held out to a child in brown robes, tiny yellow eyes glowing in curiosity; a vibroblade, humming against the flesh it tore; childish shouts; a light blinking in and out in the darkness; anger, _such anger_ , tempered with sorrow and disgust. Kenobi mastered his fear and accepted his path.

When he finally roused, night had fallen. He gathered his cloak about himself and returned to his hut, which had taken on, seemingly without permission, the impression of home. Tomorrow, he would go to Kemtuvi Oasis, the location of the most recent disappearance of the Jawa children.

 

IX. In the Footsteps of a Dragon

It is the particular nature of the desert to hide its tenderest side from the sting of examination. That fleshy extravagance granted by a surfeit of water, once brought to light, will wither as a grub torn from the dark bosom of the earth and left to parch beneath the suns’ rays. So it was with Tatooine’s oases. Pika aside, which was not a true oasis but an atmospheric moisture sink where a vaporator could draw twice as much water from the air, they were all of them tucked into a dell, or between two fortuitous crags, or wherever geography and hydrology conspired to protect a fragile ecosystem. Frequently they were small springs, short-lived and ever-shifting; more rarely they spread to encompass great territories, and became landmarks. Motesta was one of these, noted for its annual livestock festival; Kemtuvi was another, tucked in the shadows of the Jundland lowlands before they smoothed into the broad plain of Gordan.

At the northeastern edge of this oasis, partially shielding it from afternoon sunlight, was a tremendous boulder, a jut of pink granite riddled with mica, that stood higher than a ronto. This boulder served a threefold purpose: it shaded the pool from evaporation, shunted aside sucking winds from the tender shoots of greenery, and it gave the oasis its name. In composition it consisted chiefly of feldspar and pink quartz, and from a distance it bore an uncanny resemblance to the nose of a sandcrawler peeking over the hills, though this apparition faded the closer one drew. But it was the veins of mica cutting through it, catching sunlight and the eyes of distant travelers, that named it. Kemtuvi meant “signal flare” in Jawaese Trade Speak; said with the full array of pheromones and beyond a non-Jawa’s ability to understand, the meaning shifted to an impression of “the light of one’s sandcrawler seen over the dunes on a clear night, after a long journey.” Translated to Basic, the subtlety of “kemtuvi” was stripped away, plundered by that language’s dearth of poetry, and reduced to Beacon Spring.

It was here that Kenobi ventured, a narrow shadow drifting over the escarpment to where the hardpack of the plains merged with the decline of the highlands. The oasis itself was little enough, as such things were judged; surely nothing beside Motesta. A sere meadow of poonten grass spread twenty meters in diameter, and a small thicket of hubba gourds grew wild about the spring itself, husbanded by the local Jawas. Kenobi stood above the lip of the glade and let the hum of small lives fill his senses. Bandas skittered over the japor bushes; a trio of doop bugs trundled through the grass. A nest of scurriers, restive at the intrusion of a stranger, scratched at the walls of their burrow.

It was a peaceful spot, if such a thing could exist in the heart of Tatooine’s badlands.

Peaceful, but for the echo of fear that lingered, audible in the restlessness of the creatures and the crushed-sap cry of the grass. There are those in the galaxy who can sense such echoes, and Old Ben Kenobi was one such; he rubbed his palm over his chest and stepped into the oasis. His step hitched as he did, and his path, which at first would have brought him to the spring, pointed him instead toward the pinnacle of stone, triangular and harsh, that gave the oasis its name. There, the smell of fear lingered with curiosity and confusion, and a sense of malice, carefully disguised. Kenobi knelt down with knees slowly going arthritic and laid a hand on the stone.

The backlash of the psychic shout would have knocked him to the ground, had he not already been kneeling. It came from the thoughts of an utterly foreign mind, redolent with scent and vibration, and for a time Kenobi was deaf to its message; but as sense returned and logic reasserted itself, he was able to parse through the scatter of a young, scared mind as it was pulled from its home by the unscrupulous arms of a red market flesh-monger.

 _Gotta be quiet_ , he heard beneath the Jawa’s confusion. _Can you do that for me? I promise you’ll get all the squillets you want._

It was a Bothan face he saw in the child’s memories, with dark, cruel eyes set in auburn fur, and a trio of white scars over his nose. He reached out with gentle hands until the Jawa came to him--but then his hands grew vicious, crushing frail limbs and clamping a hand over the Jawa’s mouth. A wind was blowing, upwind of the sandcrawler; had it been blowing in any other direction perhaps the child could have scented a warning to her family, but the wind had trapped her pheromones against the stone, and the smell of _fear_ and _alarm_ was so strong, so thick and acrid in the air, that Kenobi retched. He tore his hands away and fell back, ripples of borrowed terror spilling through him.

There are crimes that go beyond any sentient being’s ability to tolerate, acts so foul that there is no return for the soul that commits them. They may repent, but they will never be clean; and violence against children, or indeed, any true innocent, is one such crime. Kenobi’s hands shook, not only from backlash through the Force, but his own bitter memories, his own shortcomings as a teacher. An anger kindled in him, deep and fueled by guilt and loss, and the strength of it drove him even as its familiar touch sickened him. It was not the first time he had felt black rage take him; tears soaked into his beard. Despite himself, he hated these men, who had captured innocent children and dragged them, screaming, from their homes. There was a seed deep in his heart that hated himself, as well, for an act he had failed to prevent.

He would not fail, this time. He rose to his feet and walked from the sheltered dell of the oasis, unaware that an echo of wrath and grief would be ever etched into the bedrock beneath. He walked with a light step, ready for battle; he walked as Death coming for its prey. It was a two-day journey to Bestine, the nearest starport; Kenobi made it in one.

It was the custom of the Old Republic to establish a provincial capital in every planet and territory that chose to join them, no matter how perfunctory the protection. Bestine was this for Tatooine, named by settlers from the Bestine system in a plaintive call to their former home. The transition to provincial capital, far from catapulting Bestine to the forefront of Tatooine’s economy, instead relegated it to the absolute bottom: the bulk of Tatooine’s commerce through its second-largest spaceport was banned by the Republic, and governmental oversight from such close quarters, limited though its reach was, was disastrous. Never in the history of the galaxy had any incorporation been so successful at ruining the local economy. Bestine became a mean, dusty town, for Tatooine had no use for rule from a congress so distant as to be useless. The later transition from republic to empire, from democracy to autocracy, had done nothing to change this, and the most notable alteration of Tatooine life was the replacement of the Republic embassy with a garrison of white-armored Imperials. Tatooine went on much as it always had, and Bestine became a city-state paying lip-service to Imperial dogma.

Kenobi entered the city limits as the first sun touched the horizon. The domes of the buildings echoed the mushroom-shaped rocks littering the flats beyond the western reaches; domes upon domes, conspiring by a trick of the eye to make a molehill seem a mountain. A single thoroughfare led through Bestine, the spine of the city; a handful of others ran from it, skittering their furtive ways in as much secrecy as they could beneath the shadow of the garrison fort. Stormtroopers went two-by-two, their gleaming death’s-head masks ghosting ominously through the descending gloam. Shopkeepers were closing for the day; tired drifters went from midden to midden, and grizzled spacers loitered in the bars free from Imperials. Of those, there were not many; the most notable was Grash’s Crash Pit, a seedy establishment tucked against the haunches of the fort. Despite this unfavorable location, Grash’s was free from Imperial oversight--perhaps the result of a false sense of control-by-proximity amongst the disillusioned or crooked officers sent to Tatooine, certain of their punishment, hopeless of promotion--and from this neglect, it became the underground information hub. If there was business in Bestine of an illegal nature, Grash’s was the place to discover it.

Kenobi inserted himself into the crowd of smugglers, dealers, buyers, and fences with a deep breath, as though plunging into black water. His heart pounded with the old, half-forgotten and oft-missed thrill of the chase. A man accustomed to the threat and excitement of danger does not so easily acclimate to a quiet life, no matter how dearly he may wish for one; Kenobi was no different, and was in fact far worse off, for he would not have chosen his current life of all the hundred thousand possible options in the galaxy. Life does not always ask our permission, in the changes it makes.

He lingered at the bar, sipping at his pint of bitter, and fishing for conversations on which to eavesdrop. A Force trance settled upon him, and he yielded himself to it, catching and releasing fragments of intentions as his instincts, rather than his logic, listened. Even the most logical being cannot access the deepest portions of their soul; no being is truly logical, no matter how evolved. Emotions await beneath the surface, and they will not be ignored. Kenobi listened to these feelings, the hints of intuition his lower mind released upon the urging of his connection to the Force, and he waited.

 _There_. Kenobi listened.

“You ever tried to squeeze a half-dozen scared kids on a transport?” an Aqualish was griping to his tablemate. His name was Ponda Baba. He smuggled spice for Jabba. He hated children; he was doing this because Imperial patrols on the Corellian Run were increasing, and because his partner knew unscrupulous people. “Kids are noisy, stupid, and smellier than all nine of Corellia’s hells. Don't know why I do it.”

“I do. It's good money.”

“Not good enough. I'm gonna ask ‘em for double next time I'm dirtside on Karsten, just you wait.”

Karsten. Capital of the Karstennor sector, the sector closest to Tatooine’s this orbit cycle. Kenobi didn't know much about Karsten, but he knew there were a great many biotech labs in Talendi City. The GAR had recruited a number of Karstenni medical researchers during the war; he had known one, a university student who had been profoundly irritated by the Republic’s intrusion upon her thesis research. Her name had been Modani. She had had lavender skin and a sense of sarcasm so refined it spoke to Kenobi’s soul. She had died in an attack on her medical frigate, in the midst of transferring skin cultures to cold storage.

Kenobi nursed his beer, diverting attention away from his presence and keeping an eye on his loose-lipped Aqualish. An hour passed, then two; Kenobi switched to water. The Aqualish did not, growing more expansive and benevolent toward his compatriots as the night progressed. When he pried himself from the table and staggered into the street, Kenobi followed.

Perhaps Ponda Baba would have gone home. It was late, and he did not have any flights scheduled for tomorrow, or any meetings until the afternoon, and the next scavenging mission wasn't for another month. But Kenobi was there, and Kenobi whispered to him through the Force. _You need to check on the cargo. You need to make sure they're ready for transport._

“I need to check the cargo,” Ponda Baba mumbled. “I need to make sure they're ready for transport.” He swung drunkenly about and staggered toward the spaceport.

Bestine’s spaceport was not Mos Eisley’s spaceport. It had a mere six bays, and the port security was so porous as not to exist. No criminal in their right mind would bother to operate so close to an Imperial garrison, and so, perversely, what smuggling did occur went undisturbed. Ponda Baba slouched up to a warehouse near Bay 6, near enough to bring illicit cargo to and from a ship with a minimum of attention. Kenobi watched as he entered a code and disappeared inside. By strange chance the door didn't close fully; Kenobi took advantage of that chance, and slipped after.

It gave every appearance of being empty. Kenobi wondered just how many Tatooine warehouses stood ‘empty’. He followed Ponda Baba’s Force signature to a hidden staircase; a dozen other beings were downstairs, fully half of them with the immature, malleable signatures of youth. Kenobi removed his lightsaber from his belt.

What occurred next is a matter best left forgotten. It was neither a moment of pride nor victory, short of the most technical sense: Kenobi was alive at the end of it, and the smugglers--short of Ponda Baba, who, in a twist of devilry not unlike Qel-Droma’s escape from the clutches of justice, disappeared down a bolt hole--were not. It was over quickly, and Kenobi stood in the midst of the carnage he had wrought and felt a fragment of himself, of his sense of uprightness, tarnish a little more. How close he was, to becoming the very thing he hated. How telling it was, that he had descended to hatred at all. He pulled a set of override keys from a dead man’s belt and gave them to the oldest-looking Jawa. The Tuskens, while older, had shaken their heads in confusion when he offered them. All of the children kept back from him, wary, scared. While they undid their restraints, Kenobi checked the contracts and shipping manifests scattered about the secret room, a bitter kernel of shame settling in his heart.

The children were to have been sent to Talendi City; there, they would have been unwilling test subjects at the hands of Pylorean Labs, a subsidiary of the larger Krayt Pharmaceutical Company, which received the bulk of its funding from the Imperial Ministry of Health. Kenobi felt a twinge of mingled impotence and anger. Once, he might have exposed Pylorean for the hideous parasite it was, but those days were long behind him, buried in a war he could never leave. All he could do was to protect these children, and hope Tatooine’s red market left their families in peace.

He gathered them together with the help of the oldest Jawa, an apprentice named Basha, and coaxed them up the stairs and out of the warehouse.

“I'm taking you home,” he said to them, imbuing his words with the Force so that they might understand.

They clung to him after that. It was a relief--the closer they stood to him, the more easily he could deflect attention from their presence.

They walked all that first night, slipping off the Circle Route and into the wilds of Gordan. They sheltered in the trough of a dune and slept through the heat of the day, six small bodies pressing against Kenobi’s, seeking comfort and reassurance against the weight of their terrors. Young minds are resilient, however, and by sunsdown the next night they were straying further from Kenobi’s side, regaining their confidence as the immediacy and fear of their captivity faded. The smallest Jawa, not yet four, couldn't keep up; he clung to the robes of one of the Tusken youths, who was named Yee’groth, until the youth yielded and picked him up to carry him. 

Kenobi led them from their subterranean hell through the open, scoured flats of the nighttime desert, cool and clean in their honest cruelty, and comforted them as best he could. He saw Tusken scouts over the ridges, and heard the children’s excited whispering. The best cure for them would be the arms of their families. One more day’s sleep, and then they would be at Kemtuvi Oasis, and Kenobi would be able to re-center himself. He clung to it for the same reason the children clung to him: he had nothing else to hold.

 

X. The Song in the Grass

The Tuskens and Jawas were waiting for them. They had gathered, in that unheard and unseen way in which native populations, better acquainted with their territories, surpass the clumsy footsteps of outlanders, and they stood in careful peace beneath the rock of Kemtuvi. Campfires beckoned, and the signal beacon of a sandcrawler, and the wave of relief that flooded his charges at this homecoming set an ache in Kenobi’s heart. There are wounds that time may heal, with effort and compassion; and there are wounds that no amount of care or time can knit together. It was the latter kind of wound that cut into Kenobi’s soul, cleaving him open as though the years had not passed at all. He smiled for them, through his tears.

He ushered them toward the oasis, and the joy of reunion was indistinguishable from the sting of grief. Kenobi stood apart, with the bereaved families, perhaps out of a sense of kinship and familiarity. A’Yark’s family was one of these; the war chief stood amongst them, and the weight bearing down all their shoulders brought Kenobi to shore up his own. He stood tall, and spoke words of comfort and commiseration, and explained through A’Yark (and one of the Jawas, who spoke a little Tusken) that the children still lost were surely dead, and that their deaths had been swift. The mothers were appeased, but he saw by the tilt of A’Yark’s head that the warrior was not fooled. Neither spoke of the lie; some things were better left to disappear into the night.

The wind blew through the poonten meadow, rustling the stalks and making the bushes creak, and the songs of celebration and sorrow mingled together beneath the moon-spangled night.

 

XI. A Qualification

It would be understandable, even expected, given the selected account here laid of the actions of a single man, to assume him to be a sage and a saint, incapable of doing wrong, and filled with every shred of wisdom, compassion, grace, humility, and courage a being can be heir to. His failures and misdeeds, diminished beneath the shadow of his good works, would be ignored, and his mortal failings, those vile and inescapable trammels of life in our crude shells, would be forgotten. Make Kenobi this man, and he would then be brought to the status of a demi-god, an avatar of justice upon liars and kidnappers, and the truth of his sordid corporeality crushed beneath the weight of false impression.

This perception must be avoided beyond all others. Kenobi was a man, a human born as all humans are, and as limited in his vision and strength as any other. Not even by virtue of his gift of the Force could this be otherwise.

To illustrate, there was in Anchorhead, a township Kenobi visited but rarely, a Human who was the eldest son of an absent mother. He was not an educated fellow, having fended for himself and his siblings at the expense of his schooling, and now worked at the young age of seventeen as a stocker in the general store. He was quiet, diligent, clean, and filled with no wish greater than the care of his siblings, two young girls and an infant boy. It was this care that ruined him, for while he valued his position, he was moved far more by the hungry cries of his little brother than the careful budgeting of his employer. His brother was far too young for solid foods; so in desperation, for no matter how he scrimped there was always some emergency to sap his reserve, our subject took a can of formula each day for a week. His brother stopped crying so often; he smiled more. His sisters, too, smiled more. What an innocent crime, the desire to see a child’s smile! But the boy’s employer did not see it this way, and swore to all who would listen--his young employee included--that he would see the thief rot in the darkest corner of Tatooine’s darkest jail.

It was simple bad luck that Ben Kenobi came into the store at the same time Cashe Morton was tucking a can of Chubb formula into his smock. And it was from a desire to help that he brought the boy to the counter, to confess his crime and to pay for the pilfered can. He could no more have predicted the desperate straits the boy was in, or the harshness with which the owner would seek reprisals, than he could have the shift of his own clouded future. The boy did not see a jail, for three days after being fired from his job he was shot in a gunfight near the mouth of Slauce Canyon, where Cashe had passed by to see if there was work amongst the hydroponic technicians in Mos Eisley.

The purpose of this anecdote is not to confuse or anger the reader, but rather to remind that no man is any one thing, and that to see one deed is to see a mere fraction of the man behind it. It was Kenobi’s intent to aid the shopkeeper; this was good. The result of his action--that the boy was fired, went into the desert and died, leaving behind a family in want--was not. One can have the best intentions and still find oneself accessory to evil. Kenobi made mistakes as often as any man, and the reason for his presence on Tatooine, the same as any being’s presence on that arid world who was not born to it, was the product of his fallibility. Grief is spun from tragedy. Kenobi’s tragedy was born of his blindness as much as his nobility.

 

XII. Drinks and Politics

There was a spacer of some renown in certain circles of certain markets, and while he was not known widely, or even narrowly, he had nevertheless managed to carve a comfortable living for himself amongst his fellow cargo-haulers by ignoring such obstacles as conscience, honor, and decency. He had directed himself toward his goals with the single-mindedness of an Alderaanian hound pointing to a fallen fowl, and through dint of ruthlessness, pursued them with equal fervor. He had begun as a cabin-boy aboard a freighter out of Coronet City, hoarding his credits with a tight-fistedness that would serve him well. When chance brought opportunity, he grasped it with both hands, and, having dispensed with the quaint ideas of loyalty and friendship, and replacing them with deceit and cleverness, he went about purchasing a ship of his own through heartless means. Years passed, and as they did he found himself in the curious condition of lacking all friends, family, allies, and acquaintances beyond what was necessitated by business and conjugal pleasure. It was, he remarked loudly to those nearby, a condition nonpareil. He fancied himself a devotee of Sieben; he was closer in spirit, albeit in a petty way, to Tarkin. As previously mentioned, this spacer was in all ways alone--that is, in all the ways that matter to a social being. There was a shred of his soul that recognized he needed communion despite his avowals of isolation; some fragment of his subconscious that begged of the whole: “let me converse in an intimate fashion with another being!” And so, in a ragged manner, with no small amount of coarseness and indelicacy, he would find the closeness he denied himself by flinging himself upon the patience of others with an arrogance that could only be expected of a Human.

It was by this man that Kenobi found himself accosted when he stepped into a dimly-lit spacer’s cantina in Mos Eisley, on the conclusion of that business of a personal nature which perpetually drew him to Owen Lars’s homestead, despite his persistent, and even hostile, lack of welcome. The spacer was holding court at a table of one, and the half-empty jug of liquor at his elbow spoke eloquently as to his frame of mind.

“You there!” he called out to Kenobi. “Yes, you in the cloak! Come sit with me.”

Kenobi, by virtue of the events of the day, was in that time of an indulgent mental state, and with a small, wry smile he took the seat the spacer had indicated. “How may I be of service?”

“I’ve seen you around here before,” the spacer replied, drinking deeply from his cup. “You’re the one living out in the middle of nowhere.”

“That I am.”

“I heard you talking the other day. With that bum.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The homeless waste, the Weequay.”

Kenobi leaned back in his chair, a warning glitter in his eye. “You mean Widow Juurim.”

“If you please,” the spacer answered. “She spoke of the bill the Alderaanians are pushing forward, and I overheard how you _didn't_ refute her foolish grasping.”

“You seem to have strong opinions on the matter,” Kenobi replied. 

The spacer smiled as a conqueror over the triumphant battlefield, and said, “I hate the Organas; they are ideologues, demagogues, and revolutionaries, foolishly believing in the goodness of sentients, and more blind to reality than is healthy for world leaders. It is good that the moffs can filter their shameful whining, that they can govern their sectors with an even, firm hand without the interference of the planetary governments. Because these Alderaanian peace-mongers? They piss on the needs of the galaxy. They ignore the single truth of the universe: the stronger takes, and the weaker dies or learns to take, too. It is true of everything. The tree fights for sunshine and grows its roots past the reach of its fellows. A nexu strives against his fellows for each bite of a carcass, and the one that fails to move fast enough starves. Even stars do this. They grow large and steal from each other; and when they die and collapse into themselves, they take everything they can reach to their grave. Take the smallest, meanest man and you will find a black hole inside him. This hypothesis: “all beings are equal.” How irritating! Am I to believe a Twi’lek slave girl, dancing for tips with her snatch out, is my equal? No! She should have no voice in the conference of merchants! It is out of vogue to speak down to and about women. I know this; I accept this castigation. But what of the Rodian refugees that flooded Taris during the coup! They did not have skills, they did not have a work ethic; they clogged the slums and generated plagues that strained even the might of our modern medicines. These are not the equals of upright, tax-paying citizens! Had they any sense of Tarisian politics? Of the nuances of the local history? Of the delicacy of the demands they made? Of course not! All they knew was the black hole within them that demanded the rightful share of others along with their own. The Emperor is right, I say. The beings of this galaxy need firm guidance. Fear is needed to keep them in check. Fondor, Kuat, and Corellia are manufacturing the peace we need, not the idiotic navel-gazing of the Leftist fools. But let's consider their claim for a moment, that a self-made man should be held as the equal of a layabout, that his vote should be no more important as the other’s. The self-made man will have realized the need for the economic structures around him, and will work to support or rework them, and, having learned the value of self-denial in the pursuit of a goal, will be willing to do without so that the overall infrastructure will be improved. He will vote well. The layabout, however, has none of this insight. He lays on his couch and eats spice and bemoans his lack of work even as he revels in it. He has no deeper understanding of economics or politics; he sees only that he wants, and he will vote to get what he wants, regardless of the need of the many. The layabout is selfish! The self-made man is generous. So it is. Bless the tyrants! They keep to the narrow path and walk free from the demands of the horde. Curse the republics! What planetary republic is successful, I ask you! Look at the Twi’leks! Am I to believe that these grasping aliens, who sell their children into slavery for a fistful of credits, have voted according to the betterment of their planet? Just look at Ryloth now! It crumbles! This is why the Imperial Senate is a useless gesture of appeasement, an outdated holdover from a weaker era. The Emperor should abandon it! Let the moffs have control! But I speak hastily. The Senate is not without its uses. It provides a dream for the ignorant, who would otherwise be malcontent. The Wookiee sees he has a seat in the governing body on Imperial Center and he thinks, “I am represented! The Emperor hears my voice!” and instead of rising and wasting tax credits in yet another savage rebellion, he stays quiescent, appeased in his animal ignorance. Such is the good of the Senate. It is a fiction spoonfed to the masses to keep them calm. We are a new empire, yet; the time will come when it is mature enough that the beneficent lies of childhood can be shaken off and the populace will see for itself the providence of the Empire.”

Having finished this pronouncement, the spacer cleared his throat with a swig of liquor. He had not moderated his voice; he was blind to the hard gazes of those around him, many of whom were refugees, or not human, or between jobs, or hurt by the Empire’s decrees.

“Truly breathtaking logic,” Kenobi replied. “With men of your political acumen looking out for its well-being, I am sure the Empire has nothing to fear. A word of advice, if I may?”

“Say whatever you will,” the spacer said, swollen with liquor, good feeling, and pride.

“Look up from your feet,” Kenobi said. “They are not the only ones walking.” He paid for the spacer’s next bottle and left the cantina.

 

XIII. The Hermit Confronted With a Vestige of His Past

About two years after the above conversation, an event occurred that, had any of the Tatooine locals witnessed it, would have been considered far more dangerous than any other in which Kenobi had involved himself. This was because, in a hovel on the outskirts of Mos Espa, there lived a former clone trooper, and he lay ill.

Some explanation is necessary. Even during the Wars themselves it was assumed that, were it not for the guidance of their superiors, the clones would have gone wild. Their sanity was always in close debate: how much feeling could an engineered being truly have? How much stability was left, after the genetic tinkering to which their makers subjected them? Even those who lived on planets where clones had been omnipresent were not above fearmongering, placing themselves as authorities, vaunting the knowledge gained from hearsay. In the court of rumor, one who had seen a clone was an earl; one who had overheard clones in conversation was a marquise; one who had seen a clone with his helmet off was a duke, and one who had spoken to a clone directly was king. In the court of public opinion, judge, jury and executioner found clones to be, regardless of account, untrustworthy in all respects. In the court of fools, idiocy and ignorance were wed; and the fruit of their union was calumny. A dozen tales sprang up beneath the care of gossipers, growing tall until fit to harvest and seasoned with enough truth to savor: a clone had lost his mind and slaughtered innocents. Clones scarred themselves in bloody rituals and spoke a language amongst themselves no one could understand. Clones would never be fit for civilian contact, having been steeped from birth in every possible atrocity of war. All of these were said, and more.

The clone who concerns us had been a lieutenant in the 212th Attack Battalion, and had served his government--first the Republic, then the Empire--with the quiet loyalty bred into him and all his brothers. Had it not been for a well-aimed blaster strike to the weak point in the armor behind his right knee, and the lengthy convalescence that followed, he might have stayed in the custody of the Empire, just one more aging piece of equipment, serial number CT-32-7021-A.

But this clone, who had taken to calling himself Womper, _had_ been shot, and had seen the indifference with which his brothers were treated compared to the newer, younger, differentiated stormtroopers; and while it had been a knife in his heart to abandon his squad, he could no longer stay with an organization that treated clones as nothing so much as out-of-date machinery. And so, at the ripe old age of twenty-two, Clone Trooper CT-32-7021-A had taken his single greatest step toward individuality and defected from his personnel carrier, the ISD _Inflictor_ , and made his way to the Outer Rim territories. He found a small hovel on the outskirts of Mos Espa and fended for himself, first as a blaster for hire, then, as age and his bad knee caught up to him, as a mechanic and jack-of-all-trades. He kept mostly to himself. His neighbors thought well of him, when they thought of him at all; and as the face of the clones was not widely recognized despite its prevalence, he kept a degree of anonymity that served him well. But after ten years, age, poverty, and poor medical care took their toll, and he began a slow expiration, one that left him longing for the comfort of his brothers.

It was this longing that drew Kenobi to him. The old hermit had come to Mos Espa for a shipment of diatium power cells, and, while in the midst of paying the postmaster for handling fees, had felt a profound loneliness that was at once as familiar as his own, and yet still alien in its form. To feel such an aura in Mos Espa, of all places, which he avoided when he could and passed through quickly when he couldn’t, set him severely off balance. He asked about, insistent to the point of incaution; puzzled neighbors directed him to a pourstone hut behind Matta’s Speeder Repair, tucked amidst the heaps of scrap in the back chopyard. Kenobi ducked between piles of broken, suns-blasted metal, his outline shimmering in the noon-day air, and the Force whispered to him as he passed, funereal and solemn. The door to the hut was open; Kenobi knocked on the doorpost and wondered at the jump of fear he sensed within.

“Who is it?” a gravelly voice demanded. The chill weight of recognition sank through Kenobi’s veins.

“A friend,” he replied, steeling himself.

There was a silence, one of surprise, confusion, and denial; a creased, weather-beaten face, draped in shadow and scarred by time, peered out at the visitor upon its doorstep. “You sound like… Do I know you?”

“After a fashion,” Kenobi said, pulling back his hood. “I doubt we met personally.”

The man squinted at him for a moment. Recognition was there, niggling like a loose tooth, not quite freed, in the hollow cavern of his mind; it is the cruelty of sickness that it takes from us our memories and strength before claiming our lives, and this man, his lifespan shortened by design, was close to the final gate. Kenobi waited.

“General?” he finally whispered, in a voice as dry and cracked as Tatooine’s stones.

“Not anymore,” Kenobi replied.

“But--you were dead! I was there on Utapau, Cody confirmed it!”

Kenobi flinched. Seventeen years and it was still raw.

“Sorry, sir,” the clone said. “It's--I didn't mean to. We don't--didn't--like to remember it, either.”

Kenobi said nothing. He felt the ache in every one of his bones: reawakened injuries in some, simple old age in most.

“You should come inside, sir,” the old clone said. “If we’re going to talk.”

“Thank you,” Kenobi said quietly. He ducked his head and passed over the threshold. The room beyond was as orderly as any soldier’s bunk: little more than a shed propped against the outer wall of the junkyard, it held a cot, a conservator, a ‘fresher, and a single chair, cobbled together from scrap. A soldier’s discipline showed in the precise placement of each shabby article; a quiet humility showed in the lack of unnecessary comforts. Kenobi lived more richly than this man.

The trooper sank onto his bed, succumbing to the weakness in his body. He was dying, the chill of oblivion creeping up from his toes, and he looked up at Kenobi as a sinner to his confessor.

“It wasn't something we were proud of,” he said. “I talked with my brothers after, and they said it too: wasn't right. They’d told us fair and square that the Jedi were traitors, that they'd manipulated the Senate and twisted everything around wrong, and who were we to question? There was Pong Krell--I lost a lot of friends on Umbara. And Quinlan Vos, no love lost there. Geonosis, too: no squad left unbroken. Later I heard Captain Rex say that Fives was rambling about chips in our brains, but Fives was a traitor, wasn't he? They told us he tried to kill the Chancellor--the Emperor, I mean. But it didn't make _sense_ , after. And General Skywalker--”

“That name no longer exists,” Kenobi said, more harshly than he meant.

“Sorry, sir,” the trooper said. He gazed up at Kenobi, his breathing shallow and raspy, his hand shaking with tremors. There was a child hiding behind those old man’s eyes, and Kenobi felt sick at the thought of what they had done. What all of them had done, and permitted to continue. Some injustices are small and pass unseen; some are so large, and so gross a violation, that the scope of them cannot be fathomed, and the eye turns away in horror. It is the nature of a sentient being--blinded by fear, shackled by confusion, and unable to see a path to extract themselves from the maze of their own making--to grasp the first terrible solution and use it, without allowing room for logic, compassion, or guilt. In this way, the bitter truth may be shunted aside so that the expedient crime may be employed, and only later, when time has passed, one may look back upon one’s choices and know the profundity of regret. It was so for both men in that moment, each in his own way victim and villain to the other.

Womper said, “I'm dying. I've felt it coming for a while, now.”

Kenobi, who had sensed the encroaching cold overtaking those frail limbs, reached for the medpak on the wall, though with little hope.

“Don't bother, sir,” his would-be patient said. “I've tried all that; still came down to this.” Womper sighed, and the fluid in his lungs rattled like crackling flimsiplast.

“Everyone makes a fuss about death,” he said. “Running from it and all. Now that it's knocking on the edges of me, I don't fear it as much as I did... I'm tired. A rest would be nice.”

“There's nothing to fear from death,” Kenobi said, feeling his own soul sigh in exhaustion. “Death is a release into the Force. It's those who remain who suffer.” He stared out the door into the heat-haze of a Tatooine afternoon. A voice in a classroom long ago whispered to him of the path to suffering.

“Could you tell me about the Force?”

“Surely you've heard me speak of it before.”

“I caught bits and pieces. You never spoke of it much, least not to us. Wasn't our business, I figured.”

Kenobi looked down at the trooper laying wasted and sunken-eyed before him. A dozen faces overlaid his; some identical, some vastly different, all passing in a hush of memory before vanishing into the shadows. “The Force is…” he said, unsure where to begin. So pervasive and immediate a concept--how does a fish describe the water around it? _Explain it like you would to a padawan_ , he thought, and felt a pang of pained denial. “The Force is like gravity,” he finally said, falling back on an old, well-worn script. “We cannot see it, but it is all around us, and it draws us together. What we call the soul is an emanation of the Force, drawn for a short time into form before it is released upon death. When you die, you will return to the Force.”

“That's nicer than what they told us on Kamino,” Womper sighed.

“What did they tell you there?”

“That when we died we would end. That we would be no more, and our bodies would rot, and we would be forgotten.”

Kenobi shook his head, overcome at the cruelty of what he had been party to. He roused himself and asked, “What is your name, trooper?”

“CT-32-7021-A,” the trooper replied. “My brothers called me Womper.”

“I will not forget, Womper.”

The trooper relaxed, as though a great weight had been lifted from him. “Thank you, sir.”

Beyond the doorway, doubled shadows shifted and lengthened across the sandy yard as first Tatoo I, then Tatoo II slipped from their apogees. Dust swirled in a miniature storm at the gentle hand of a passing breeze; the roar of a badly-calibrated speeder convoy, clanking over the flats on the approaches to Mos Espa’s outskirts, passed in the distance.

“I assume you defected?” Kenobi asked.

It took a moment for Womper to respond, lost as he was in the reflections of a dying mind.

“We weren't human to them,” he said. “We were organic machines past our expiration date.” Kenobi caught a glimpse of the fate Womper had witnessed, which had driven him from the comfort of the familiar and into the wasteland of solitude, a hideous place for an order-bred clone to find himself: euthanasia, administered with a dispassionate hand, and hidden from their fellows. Out with the old, in with the new: unmodified, uncloned, _natural_ recruits from the nascent Imperial Academies, full of patriotism and free of bitter memories, war wounds, or difficult questions. Kenobi let out a shaky breath and took Womper’s hand. There was a frailty to it, a bird-hollow delicacy that was at odds with the faded scars criss-crossing his knuckles.

“We did you and your brothers a--We should never have--”

“What else would we have done?” Womper said, his eyes looking for the first time as old as the rest. “Soldiering was all we knew. It would have been even more of a cruelty to let us loose. We were bred to be loyal and trusting, General; we would have been mincemeat in the wider world. Behind a helmet, we knew our objective, we had direction and purpose. You gave us faith.”

“What kind of faith is that! In the power of fallible beings? All the worse for our arrogance in assuming that mantle! That we thought ourselves fit to lead men--boys, children! The oldest of you not yet ten years old!--into the chaos of battle! We were no wiser than you.”

“The blind leading the blind,” Womper said. “What's done is done. If it's any comfort to you, General, those years fighting beneath you were the best years I've had.”

Kenobi’s throat constricted, and when he spoke he had to coax the words out. “They were for me, as well.” He felt Womper’s hand grow cold in his.

“You said the Force is everywhere?” the trooper asked. “All around us?”

“It is,” Kenobi said, leaning forward so Womper could see him, though those roving eyes no longer looked upon the sand-colored walls of his hovel. “I can't claim to be an expert, not even in this, despite all our claims to the contrary; but when you die, you return to the Force. Not your body; this returns to the matter of the Universe. But your soul rejoins that underlying Principle that flows through all things. You will be the Force, and the Force will be you. You will be free from pain and loss; you will be One.”

“Will Tine and Joker be there?”

“I don't know. What we recognize as ‘self’ is necessarily constrained by our existence; when we die, we transcend that. Who is Womper without his body to define him? Who am I? Who are Tine and Joker? Take away the thoughts and emotions that burden us from day to day, take away the thousand worries and attachments, take away the likes and dislikes and allergies and memories that cling to the flesh and what remains? ‘Self’ is a lie we tell ourselves to make sense of the arbitrary nature of corporeality. Take away the self and what remains is the soul. I suspect Tine and Joker have been waiting, but I can't promise it. It could be that we are only ripples in the Force, eddies that pool about a mortal body for a span of time, taking on a certain character and color, before returning to itself when that time ends. In that sense, Tine and Joker never left you, Womper, and you will simply return to them as you return to the Force.”

Before he had finished speaking, Womper gave a shuddering sigh. His fingers spasmed briefly against Kenobi’s, then relaxed into peace; the aching pull of his beleaguered lungs ceased, and his brow smoothed almost to the innocence of childhood, perhaps for the first time.

“‘And they sorrowed no more, for the Force was with them,’” Kenobi said softly. He held silent vigil over the body, feeling the cloud of life that even now hovered within it. Bacteria, protozoa, viruses, mites; a trillion tiny creatures lived still, a galaxy in miniature that pressed on despite the death of its central star. So it is with all things: to understand the infinite, the gaze must first be turned within. 

Kenobi meditated beside Womper’s deathbed until the first sun touched the horizon; and when he rose and stepped from the hovel, he felt at peace. 

XIV. The Solitude of Ben Kenobi

There is a certain quality to a life lived in bone-deep exhaustion, when a soul has let go those few things which made it happy and begun the slow march toward death. To say Kenobi had nothing to live for would be disingenuous; the above accounts should have served to demonstrate that Kenobi had duty in spades. But man cannot thrive on duty alone, and so Ben Kenobi grew old before his time.

One cannot express fully the magnitude of his solitude. Removed from his origins, from those he had come to consider his family, from all things known and loved; riddled with self-doubt, isolated even from the source of his remaining drive. He spoke to the few beings who found themselves in his vicinity; he patrolled and kept watch. But there is a very human need to feel needed, to have the sense in one’s bones that there are others around you who care for your well-being, that cannot be replaced. A child denied the gentle touch and care of its parents will grow stunted and dour, with little reserve of confidence or joy; so it was with Kenobi. His soul grew small and withered as a desert plant. He followed his destined path and did not let himself falter in his unwearying vigil; as penance, perhaps, or as safeguard.

The encounter with the clone trooper, his impotence at securing any long-term solution to the abduction of Jawa and Tusken children--these wounded him. The ostracism of Owen Lars, too, cut him deeply. He kept to his hut on the edge of the Jundland Wastes, and marked the passing of the years by the gray in his beard and the length of a growing boy’s shadows on the salt pan. He forced himself through his daily routines and employed a terrible discipline to get to his feet each day.

A storm was rising on the horizon, yellow-gray sand riding the air into the blue of Tatooine’s sky. Old Ben Kenobi closed himself into his hut and waited for the leading winds to strike. There was nowhere for him to run.


	2. The Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Tantive IV—C-3PO and R2-D2 Brave Enemy Fire—Some Particulars of Droid Development and Their Duties Aboard Ship—The Dark Lord—In the Access Hatch to the Escape Pods—A Last Resistance—In Which the Damage Appears Less Severe From a Distance—Frustrations, Failures, and Twists of Fate—Planetfall—C-3PO’s Journey—R2-D2’s Journey—Reunited—The Jawas of Nebit’s Clan—Hot Pursuit—We Come to An Outpost of Civilization

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is! The much belated second chapter! This summer was absolutely hellish, folks; hopefully chapter three doesn't take half as long to finish as this one did. Endless thanks to my betas--I pretty sure I owe my firstborn child to preved-medved, who sacrificed two weeks of evenings to help me kick this monstrosity into shape. An arm and a leg go to cyanwars, who graciously did a last-minute spit-shine when I asked. I do not deserve you people.

I. The Tantive IV

The void of space spread as a sea between worlds. Empty, velvet-black, it stretched beyond the ability to comprehend. Distances more vast than a lifetime, more profound than the space between atoms. A desert more terrible and more fertile than any planet could claim. Space, in all its splendor; and in one corner of it there hung a jewel of a planet, a topaz-hued gem that cast reflected light into the darkness with all the force of a sun.

But it was not a sun. It was a refuge, and a ship raced toward its shelter.

It was a small ship, privately owned, white-hulled according to current fashion; crimson stripes proclaimed its diplomatic immunity. It was a corvette commissioned some sixteen years previous as a custom order and built in the shipyards of the Corellian Engineering Corporation. Six modified turbolaser banks bolstered the standard complement, and a battery of ion engines, eleven in total, were housed in a drive block half again as powerful as any other in service. It was an altogether eloquent emblem of its time. Had it not been for the loyalty of the subcontractor--purchased with ideals instead of money, and thus of far more value than money could buy--the Empire would doubtless have learned of this blockade runner being built for the Royal House of Alderaan. As it was, the ship’s consular markings camouflaged it enough for its owners’ purposes, and the _Tantive IV_ set out on its maiden voyage, an innocent jump between Alderaan and Imperial Center for senatorial duties. Fifteen years on, its journey wasn't so peaceful: all eleven of its engines were running full-bore, sending the little ship careening toward the planet below.

Regard the backdrop upon which the scene took place: stars twinkling in the void; the planet, casting its yellow light; the white ship, speeding toward safety. Now see the antagonist. From the terminus of the planet a shadow loomed, wedge-shaped and crowned. Three massive ion drives propelled it. It pulled into sunlight, and it gleamed, sharp as a blade, white as a bone, in the punishing light of twin suns. It gained upon the little ship, parsec by parsec, seeming by sheer dint of size to move in the slow crawl of a glacier, but it ran with the strength of a torrent. It fired upon its prey, and the corvette’s shields buckled. The _Tantive IV_ fired back, desperate for an escape, desperate for a reprieve from this vast foe, but its paltry turbolasers were nothing against shields strong enough to repel a capital ship bombardment. Speed was its only ally, but here, too, it was outmatched; for in the vacuum of space, size made no difference, only the power of one’s engines--and the engines of the colossus dwarfed those of the little ship by a factor of ten.

This was the Imperial Star Destroyer _Devastator_ , the scourge of Ralltiir. It had pursued the _Tantive IV_ relentlessly, as an Ossian tree lizard hunts a gokob, since the _Tantive IV_ ’s escape to hyperspace in the Topwara system. It would not lose its prey again. An Immobilizer 418 Class heavy cruiser--an Interdictor named the _Excelsior_ \--was stationed above the planet’s largest moon on behalf of the Imperial Customs fleet; it was a handful of days from moving on, letting a Customs frigate resume its usual posting, and it was with great relief that the captain of the _Devastator_ , a prissy, brutally competent man named Primus Tion, requested an interdiction. Breathless minutes passed while the _Excelsior_ charged its projectors, minutes in which it seemed the _Tantive IV_ might flee once more. But then, with a slow pull of time and space, the _Excelsior_ projected an artificial well of gravity over the shipping lanes, so dense that even a blockade runner couldn't jump to hyperspace and make an escape.

The _Tantive IV_ did not go easily to its fate. On every channel, on every bandwidth it could muster, mayday signals screamed into the black. None came to their aid. They were being chased by a star destroyer, and one did not lightly trespass between a hound of the Empire and its prey. In between the comms channels, masked by their frequencies and boosted upon hyperlight carriers, other coded signals were being sent. These were more vital and more dangerous, linked to the _Tantive IV_ ’s true purpose and so, by definition, treasonous; but the comm operators didn’t have long to worry, for a blow from the _Devastator_ obliterated the rear deflector shields, and a heartbeat later another vaporized the communications array. Supercharged plasma flooded the dorsal access shafts, overloading the circuits to the starboard shield generator. The generator, a device unequal to the stresses put upon it, exploded, and in the chaos of its death it damaged the power systems that fueled it--and the reactors that fueled the engines. The little ship stumbled to a halt, drifting in high orbit above its destination, unable to run, unable to hide, unable even to scream for help. Its pursuer closed the distance between them. It rumbled over the corvette, hiding it in shadow. The turbolaser cannonade ceased; its signal jammers fell silent. The Star Destroyer edged up to the crippled ship, trapping it to its bosom.

The _Tantive IV_ was captured.

Let us come closer to this beleaguered skiff of the stars. Let us breach the ferro-magnesium/ceramic composite of the hull and step into its hallways--white again, in accordance with Alderaanian taste--and sit upon the cream-colored upholstery of the salon. It was a political choice, this light furnishment, as much as it was aesthetic; the Imperial government favored dark, saturated colors for its trimmings and brutalist architecture in its public spaces; in contrast, the style of Alderaan was light. There was tradition behind the style, to be sure--Alderaan had a marked preference for pastels and airy, welcoming spaces--but in a galaxy where every world from Mygeeto to Malastare sought to show their loyalty to the Empire with thrice-dyed drapes, such contumacy drew notice. The diplomatic staterooms did not hide the fact that they were on a spaceship, but enhanced the virtues of such travel: gracious viewports overlooked the stars; close halls and low ceilings created a snug, protected air; fine furniture, paintings, and objets d’art drew the eye and allowed it to rest; a tapestry by the great Pierdensen himself hung in the dining room, showing Aldera at sunrise, resplendent, her silver towers washed gold against the rosy, snowcapped peaks of the Triplehorns. Nowhere was there a portrait of the Emperor, and the wine cabinet was conspicuously bare of Naboo vintages.

But now the staterooms were empty. No dignitaries lounged on the silk-embroidered couches, no ambassadors partook of the rare wines. They sat silent, vacant, expectant; the crystal chandelier over the entry hall shook with the blasts rattling the ship’s infrastructure. The scions of Alderaan did not huddle, coward-like and mean, when battle came to them. They fought with their troops and shared in their fate.

Beyond the stateroom door, in the halls of the ship, there was no peace, no gentle rest. Alarms sounded in the crew companionways, sending engineers and gunners to and fro; comms personnel scorched by plasma discharge crowded the small medbay.

Corla Metonae held position beside her uncle and commanding officer, Captain Raymus Antilles, on the bridge of the _Tantive IV_. She had served with him since the closing of the Clone Wars aboard the _Sundered Heart_ ; she had followed him to this new duty post, weathering missteps and winning acclaim for her organizational acumen, and had risen to the rank of Chief Petty Officer. The lives on board were her responsibility as much as his. She shared a grim look with her captain.

“We aren't going to survive this one,” she said quietly.

“We have to try,” Antilles replied. “Even one survivor could tip the balance.”

She nodded. “I had the computers wiped per your orders, sir. All that's left is what's in the Princess’s hands.”

“Let’s hope she has a plan.”

A technician called out from her station. “Captain, auxiliary sensors report a TIE/br on approach!”

Captain Antilles’s expression grew stern. “Chief Metonae. Call the muster.”

“Aye, sir.” Metonae turned and hit the alarm. “Blue Squadron,” she barked over the comms, her voice echoing through the ship. “This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill. Muster in the aft main corridor, forward of the docking hatches. Prepare to repel boarders. Metonae out.”

Her words were as the kick that meets the hornet’s nest. Marines spilled from their bunks, filling the halls with organized chaos. They had kept out of the way of the gunners and engineers; now it was their turn, and they ranged themselves along the corridor with firm resolve and no small amount of dread. The _Tantive IV_ had a complement of twenty dedicated marines; the rest of the crew--the engine technicians, the bridge personnel, the diplomatic aides--while trained, were not soldiers. They were armed and told to hold the rear should the forward lines fall, but many had never so much as held a gun.

What passed through the hearts and minds of these men and women? What tremors of fear, or hope, or desperation, or brave determination? The marines, at least, were soldiers, and well-acquainted with the prospect of death; no being, however, goes to face that black foe without a sliver of uncertainty. Those noble freedom fighters, armored in fatigues and battered helmets, blasters held at the ready, felt a bitter kinship to doomed men witnessing the final descent of the executioner’s sword. They stared at the docking hatch, the threshold of their fate. Death was already among them, choosing her favored few. To the most pragmatic, this was a comfort; they would die, or they would live, and it was beyond their hands. To the youngest, those who had yet to face enemy action, it was a terror that transcended the hard reality of the stormtroopers even now approaching their fragile little ship.

A number of droids remained in the upper corridors, disoriented by the chaos and forgotten, left to find their own ways to safety. Gold and silver, blue and red; they muttered and whistled among themselves. “We’re doomed,” one said mournfully. “There'll be no escape for the princess this time.” His counterpart whistled doubtfully; he, at least, had greater trust in their mistress’s abilities.

From the exterior of the ship there came a series of clanks and thuds, echoing hollowly through the corridors, sounding to the ear as of a threat, or an omen--or perhaps the magnetic grapples of a boarding vessel attaching to the hull, a remora to the belly of a whale. The two aforementioned droids, insofar as they were physically capable, looked about with trepidation. The taller of the duo, plated gold and with joints as stiff as his sense of propriety, found himself glad for the stalwart presence of his counterpart, a squat, barrel-shaped astromech, typically of a dubious sense of humor but who regardless had courage in spades. The first was a humanoid protocol droid, designation C-3PO; the second was numbered R2-D2, and it was he that led the way past the lines of marines to the alcove tucked away from the main hall.

This was good timing, for no sooner had they found cover than the edges of the port hatch began to smoke and spark, the shriek of protesting metal filling the hall. The marines gripped their guns more tightly; they gritted their teeth and prepared themselves for battle. The sound of the hull cutter shearing through the hatch seals seemed to go on forever, though in objective time it took a mere handful of moments; it assaulted the ears, scraping along nerves and winding them tighter with anticipation and fear. The droids were not immune to it, inorganic though they were, and C-3PO, normally of a loquacious disposition, found himself silent. R2-D2 stayed in his ready position, his third, retractable leg lowered for movement, ready to flee or fight at a moment’s notice.

The hatch seals gave with a gasp of flame. Smoke billowed, torn by the eddies of colliding atmospheres. Blaster bolts followed, cutting through the smoke like firebugs in the night, gleaming for a moment before winking out; but where a firebug might leave an afterimage and a memory of childhood wonder, these vanishing lights left the reek of ozone and a charred hole in their wake, whether in a wall or in the soft tissues of a body. The marines returned fire.

Imperial stormtroopers climbed through the hatch, heedless of the blaster bolts ripping the air around them. Their armor, white upon white, disappeared into the smoke; only the black of their eye- and mouthpieces showed through, frowning goblins, eidolons, flickering in and out of sight. The marines did their best, but not for nothing were the Imperial Stormtroopers feared throughout the galaxy. Their armor, plastic alloy, blast-resistant, took more than a single hit to penetrate, protecting its wearer from glancing blows. Their training was rigorous, both physical and mental; they were not assassins, but formidable nonetheless. This was the 501st Legion, legendary, ruthless, the select of the Empire, unafraid of a band of half-trained militia from a peaceful, long-demilitarized planet. The marines fell like wheat in a harvest field.

 

II. C-3PO and R2-D2 Brave Enemy Fire

Upon this field, the droids C-3PO and R2-D2 gazed. They were sheltered in their nook, but the stormtroopers were drawing near, and the returning fire was growing more sporadic. The marines were falling back, unable to hold their positions.

R2-D2 stood silent a moment longer, considering their situation. Of the two, he was the most acquainted with combat, and the least prone to panic; their predicament ticked through his logic processors, and he came to a number of conclusions. For the first, the small complement aboard the _Tantive IV_ , no matter how desperate or fierce, would never be able to succeed. The average star destroyer carried a crew complement of thirty-seven thousand, over nine thousand of which were infantry and marines. They were outmatched in every way. For the second, the _Tantive IV_ was crippled and pinioned; the only way the ship could escape was if the Alderaanians fought off this boarding party and somehow managed to enter hyperspace. With the reactor nonfunctional and space-time warped by an interdictor, that was an impossibility. For the third, final, and most dire conclusion, they were exposed in this position, vulnerable to stray blaster shots. The Imperials might not spare the organic crew, but droids were far too valuable to destroy outright. If they wanted to evade Imperial custody--and more importantly, see to the well-being of their mistress (whom, R2-D2 reflected sardonically, his taller compatriot seemed to have completely forgotten)--they would have to leave their berth and throw themselves upon the mercy of the Imperial marksmen. R2-D2 gave the matter a millisecond’s serious consideration, then whistled his intentions to his counterpart. He set out a moment later, denying C-3PO a chance at rebuttal, for he knew that any chance C-3PO had to second-guess and counter-argue would be one second closer to engagement with the stormtroopers. R2-D2 set out across the hall, a distance no more than a meter and a half, but which might as well have been a kilometer and a half; there could be no short distance when crossing a field of fire. R2-D2 rolled, and behind him C-3PO hurried afoot, and all about them sizzled the burnt ozone stink of superheated plasma. R2-D2 felt it as a bolt passed directly in front of his fuselage. The spark of excitement that blew through his circuits made the infrared input on his visual sensor stand crisp and sharp.

C-3PO kept up a chorus of woe as he followed, bereft of logic in his dismay; it wasn't until they found themselves across the hall in the life support maintenance tunnel that he found his words. “I don't know why I bother following you at all, you're determined to see us blown to bits! Well, I won't be party to it! We will go down to Maintenance, and we will wait for what's in store for us, good or ill, and we will _certainly_ not cross any more war zones to reach it!”

R2-D2 gave a single blat of sound. He had little patience for C-3PO’s worrying, not when there were more important tasks at hand.

 

III. Some Particulars of Droid Development and Their Duties Aboard Ship

It may suit the reader to know, for the purposes of greater familiarity with the _dramatis personae_ here introduced, and in such detail as may be permitted, their history aboard the doomed vessel; and so to interrupt the flow of the narrative in the manner such a digression deserves.

The protocol line of droids laid down by Cybot Galactica was initialized some four thousand years before the rise of Sheev Palpatine, in the time of the Jedi Civil War, and its profitability and relevance ensured by the subsequent Great Sith War, when early generations of translation and etiquette droids were indispensable in negotiations between two acrimonious and frequently culturally incompatible groups. Cybot Galactica, in a daring shift from the cautious practices of its competitors, installed in its droids personality processors from the nascent SyntheTech Corporation, a minuscule programming company destined for greatness. Its head programmers--and sole employees--still lived with their parents on Joruna and sold replacement vocabulators out of their garage. The A-01 VerboBrain was the first fruit of their efforts; when a fortuitous accident involving hot caf and an iffenda peel brought their creation to the attention of Cybot Galactica’s CEO, Gurril Zormine, history was made. Several other additions to the emerging droid model, including a series of communications modules, most famously the TranLang III module installed in the year 242 BTC, conspired to create the most wildly successful etiquette and protocol droid the galaxy had ever seen.

Indeed, the true genius of the protocol droid as a translator, short of its knowledge of etiquette, was its awareness of cultural nuances and background. One might translate the Bothese phrase “Ghrrezhkunm pak immelar” as “triumph of the sixth moon,” but the meaning of the phrase--its connotations in conversation, its implications, and its history--would be lost without knowledge of Arkh Kaal’s defeat at the summit on Bothawui’s sixth moon in year 12,012 of their calendar, wherein the aforementioned warlord, despite his armies, was outmaneuvered in a pivotal vote by a seemingly insignificant clan leader who knew the pressure points of all her fellows. In a single stroke this woman, whose name is lost to time but who came to be known as Immelan the Great, brought every single clan against Arkh Kaal and divided his forces along their clan lines. Thus, directly translated, the phrase in question means a political victory; but it loses its implication of nonviolence, the triumph of feminine cunning over male brute strength, and a certain wry tone of “one did not look carefully where one stepped.”

So, it is not the words alone that make a translation; it is the context behind them that carries the day. “Misty sun” and “foggy light” may share a similar denotation, but their connotations are radically different to a Corellian, and using one or the other at the wrong moment could be disastrous. Protocol droids, with their vast catalogues of linguistic variations and cultural mores, became the backbone of negotiating parties everywhere.

This utility was fully recognized with C-3PO, a unit endowed with the latest generation AA-1 VerboBrain and an unexpected personal capability. He had stood beside Viceroy Bail Organa, Imperial Senator for Alderaan, during the Regna conflict, and beside Bail’s daughter, Princess Leia Organa, in her humanitarian work and later assumption of the role of Imperial senator. However, due to the often sensitive nature of his assignments and his chronic inability to keep silent, C-3PO’s memory was regularly wiped. R2-D2 found this both tremendously amusing--for he was a connoisseur of the ironic in all its forms, base or subtle, crude or ingenious, and there was nothing quite as choice as hearing his friend remark on the impossibility of a compact he had had a leading part in forming--and tremendously sad, as well. C-3PO may not have stood among the most famous of droids, but he had nevertheless made an indelible impact on the lives of a great many. Yet he was entirely unaware of it.

Physical differences aside, R2-D2 stood in contrast to C-3PO in every possible way. C-3PO worried; R2-D2 was steady. C-3PO was fussy and proper; R2-D2 was notoriously creative with his use of Binary. C-3PO interfaced with organics; R2-D2 interfaced with machines and computers. Indeed, R2-D2 was a slicer of unparalleled (and unacknowledged) skill; foreign systems crumbled before his scomp link. He took a quiet pride in his abilities, for while his efforts were no more recognized than C-3PO’s, they had similarly defended the freedoms of countless individuals. And he, of the two of them, was able to keep his datastream circumspect. R2-D2’s memory was long.

Astromech droids were the products of Industrial Automaton, and the R2 series was by far its most successful line. It was a sturdy, customizable, quick-learning droid, programmed from the manufacturer with specifications for over 700 different spacecraft; ingenious programming and clever design came together fortuitously, and R2 droids rapidly became the darlings of pilots everywhere, remaining popular even with the advent of newer models. Even now vintage R2 models can be found throughout the galaxy, weathered diamonds in the rough, calmly performing their duties with the implacability and devotion of artificial intelligence.

Industrial Automaton, formed some 850 years before the rise of the Empire, was the product of a merger between Industrial Intelligence and Automata Galactica. Their headquarters were on the planet Nubia, in the Inner Rim; they distributed galaxy-wide. Their other products included GNK power droids and the LOM-series protocol droids for non-humanoid consumers. Together with Cybot Galactica, they formed the “Big Two” of droid companies, and two of the pillars of the Corporate Sector Authority, the primary economic powerhouse for over thirty thousand systems: poisoning worlds, gouging consumers, dominating galactic industry, and viciously asserting their patents far beyond sense or decency.

But the sins of their makers are not the fault of the two droids we concern ourselves with now. R2-D2 was an operations specialist aboard the _Tantive IV_ , assisting with engine repairs, running astrogation equations when the navicomputer was down, and very occasionally, providing emotional support for his crew. C-3PO, on the occasions he could constrain himself, was useful as an interpreter, counselor, butler, dogsbody, and liaison between the organic and inorganic crewmembers. It was often said that on a starship, a protocol droid and an astromech together were a captain’s best resource.

It was with great hurry and no small amount of strong language that this pair descended into the labyrinthine side corridors of the ship. It was good they did, for a new threat had boarded the _Tantive IV_ , one far worse than any stormtrooper, cloaked in malevolence, midwife and handmaiden to terror. This threat was Darth Vader.

 

IV. The Dark Lord

Over the course of twenty years, the galaxy had descended beneath the sweep of a cloud. It brought no rain of water, but soaked fields with blood, watering grief sowed with tears. The Reconquest of the Rim; the Kessel massacre; the bombing of Callos; the subjugation of Kashyyyk and the enslavement of the Wookiees; despair resounded, reverberating through an ancient, burned-out temple, the memory of murdered children haunting its halls, to toll through the Empire, a debt-collector’s bell, a carillon of sorrow.

On the main deck of the _Tantive IV_ , by the port hatch, the battle had gone silent. Marine and stormtrooper alike lay spread across the floor, injured and dead, but only stormtroopers now stood. Smoke lingered, heavy in the air, drifting down hallways in a slow creep of reaching tendrils; by the hatch it was still thick, obscuring the eye.

There, in the heart of that fey mist, a shadow moved. An ominous rasp followed, as of a great and fearsome monster breathing: _in, out… in out…_ All who heard that sound never forgot it; all who remembered it did so with a lingering shudder and disturbed dreams. The shadow coalesced, pulling into the form of an enormous man in black, towering over his troops. His cape swirled behind him; his footsteps were purposeful. He wore black armor, so dense a black that it seemed to draw the light to him, consuming it; he was a singularity of fear, an event horizon so vast and immediate that hope could not escape. The helmet twisted into a gargoyle mask. Its visage conjured every demon of every faith of every world, its teeth bared in a snarl, its eyes wide, sightless, condemning, eerie. And always his breath: _in, out… in, out…_ The only hint of weakness this man showed, the only shred of humanity (for human he was, if the term could be so loosely applied), was a softly-blinking console on his chest: controls for a portable life-support suit. He was a nightmare made flesh. The lights of the captured ship gleamed off his helmet. This was Darth Vader, dark lord of the Sith, come to inspect his prize. He beheld the scene of slaughter and his troops fell silent, gooseflesh and the prick of nervous sweat rising beneath their armor.

“Report,” he said to the commanding officer of the boarding party.

“Sir,” the trooper replied, “The ship is ours. Six of our own dead, three injured. We’re still subduing the lower decks, but they’re on the retreat and their losses considerable.” He gazed upon the contorted mask of his superior officer, and not even the scant protection of his own helmet could prevent him from feeling flayed open by Vader’s regard.

“Very good, Commander. Have you captured anyone of note?”

“We have the captain and first officer.”

“Any noncombatants?”

“Not yet, sir. We think they might be in the engine rooms or cargo bay. We’ll find them.”

“See that you do, Commander. This is a ship of vipers, and we must not allow any to escape. Show me the captain.”

“Sir.” The stormtrooper bowed and led the way.

It was the highest honor to fight beneath Lord Vader. His legion was the finest in the Imperial Army; he permitted only the best to join its ranks. For an ambitious officer it was a blessing to be transferred to the 501st. But Company Commander Jackson Khober did not feel blessed, either by Providence or by the Emperor, as he led Vader down the hall to the airlock where they had detained the bridge personnel. Darth Vader radiated cold threat, and Khober found himself wondering, not for the first time, if he would ever see his wife and daughter again.

This was Lord Vader as seen by his own troops. Imagine, then, the shudder that ran through the captured crew, seated in rows in the tiny antechamber, their heads lowered in defeat, certain only of their very short futures. They heard the approach of footsteps--not so unusual, in a spaceship, and to be expected with the comings and goings of a subduing party. But then, raising each from the mire of their own murky thoughts, came the hiss of breathing, deep and sinister: _in, out… in, out…_ Those who knew what that sound portended curled in on themselves and said what prayers they had. Those who did not know, who looked to the hallway with innocence, who heard the artificial breaths of a ventilator and the heavy footsteps of a life-support suit and frowned in confusion; these individuals bore the wretched burden of meeting Darth Vader at the profundity of failure, when only two options remained: a quick or lingering death, and no ability to choose between them.

“Raymus Antilles,” Vader said, in a voice like boulders cracking beneath the weight of a glacier. “It seems your Rebel sympathies have finally betrayed you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Captain Antilles replied, looking up from his knees, schooling his face from showing his consternation.

Vader lunged, grabbing him by the throat and lifting him bodily from the floor. “I don’t have time for your prevarications, Captain,” he said, his voice deep and ominous. He was interrupted from further speech by the approach of a white-armored trooper, requisitioned into messenger duty.

“The death star plans are not in the main computer,” the trooper said, seemingly unaffected by the sight of Lord Vader holding a grown man in the air. It was, he reflected in the sanctuary of his thoughts, the very least of what he had seen.

Vader turned to Captain Antilles. “Where are those transmissions you intercepted? What have you done with those plans?”

“We intercepted no transmissions!” the unhappy captain forced out. His captor’s grip closed about his windpipe, as merciless and implacable as a durasteel trap. “This is a consular ship! We’re on a diplomatic mission--”

Those iron fingers spasmed around Antilles’s throat, cutting him off. Vader was growing impatient, and this line of inquiry was going nowhere. “If this is a consular ship, where is the ambassador!” He didn’t bother to wait for a reply; if there was one, it disappeared beneath the delicate crunch of cartilage as Vader’s fingers crushed Antilles’s trachea. He flung the captain aside. Antilles struck the wall and fell, gurgling through the horror of his destroyed throat, unable to breathe, into a crumpled heap on the deck.

“Commander, tear this ship apart until you’ve found those plans. And bring me the passengers, I want them alive!” He swept out of the airlock, leaving the crew of the _Tantive IV_ in shock as they witnessed the last moments of their captain. The stormtrooper commander looked across at his own captain. They said nothing, and their helmeted faces betrayed nothing; but two men locked in a similar situation, exposed to its hardships and trials, needed no words to communicate once a certain level of familiarity had been reached. Commander Khober had fought beside Captain Netinye for five years; he was a fine subordinate. They had mutual respect in spades, and had been known to share a pint together in the officer’s mess. Now, they gazed over the prisoners’ heads and shared an altogether different communion.

_For the glory of the Empire._

They went about their ways.

 

V. In the Access Hatch to the Escape Pods

The maintenance tubes did not feel a sufficient buffer from the fight for C-3PO’s comfort. The marines’ resistance was nearing its end, the final shots ricocheting with lonely finality against the blast-shielded main corridors. C-3PO was certain his circuits were irreparably harmed from stress, though in truth no such thing was the case; said circuits were heated, but they had been durably made, and could withstand a great deal more. It is the nature of the nervous to see death in the shadow of a sneeze.

A more immediate concern to the droid, however, was the absence of his companion. R2-D2 had gone missing in the crossfire, vanishing upon reaching the darkened hall, and he did not answer any of C-3PO’s increasingly frantic queries.

“Artoo-Deetoo, where are you?”

There came no reply. C-3PO peered about: left and right down the hall, and even down the way they had come; but there was too much smoke from the ship’s overloaded circuitry for him to see. They were very close to the portside shield projectors, which had been damaged in the fight; this filled the maintenance tube with a curtain of impenetrable haze. Another battery of blaster bolts zinged behind him; C-3PO jumped, made skittish by perilous circumstance. Finally, a moment of grace: R2-D2 chirped through the gloom. “Do not worry,” was the rough effect of his cycle of Binary. “You can rely on me.” It made little sense to C-3PO. He craned his head to look, and down the left arm of the corridor he spotted R2-D2, standing square in the middle of the hall; off to the side, an apparition: a seeming figure, draped in white, blending in with the clouds of vaporized plastoid and metal. It appeared and disappeared at random, first standing tall, then shrinking down into itself. C-3PO could not track it, and so concluded it must be data spill in his visual processors. Rendering the chaotic fluid dynamics of smoke could be quite tricky, he reasoned; he was seeing things. The fact that the opposite might have been true--that there _was_ a person at the end of the hall, a person who was standing before the recalcitrant and headstrong R2 unit whom C-3PO claimed as a friend, kneeling to insert a data card into his reader, and who, with the caution of a hunted animal, retreated to the shadows upon C-3PO’s unguarded approach--did not at any point occur to him; and had such a possibility penetrated his certainty, he would surely have exclaimed aloud and sought to bring aid. This was precisely why the figure he had espied--the diplomatic envoy herself--had chosen to remain hidden and let C-3PO come to his own conclusions. Despite her cautions, C-3PO came too near her hiding place, and R2-D2 swung abruptly toward him, lowering his retractable third foot for greater maneuverability, and went to turn him aside, dissembling with overly cheerful beeps as he did. 

C-3PO was voluble in his relief. “At last! Where have you been? I had thought you were captured!” R2-D2 attempted to interject into this, but C-3PO had found his stride, and now wasn't to be turned aside. “I can hear them now! They're heading in this direction! What are we going to do? We’ll be sent to the spice mines of Kessel, or smashed into who knows what!”

To such a melodramatic pronouncement R2-D2 had no reply. He gave his taller associate a long look; C-3PO was not precisely wrong, although they were far more useful to the Empire if kept intact. At worst, their memories would be wiped. And R2-D2 knew this was the 501st Legion, Vader’s Fist; they, of all droids, would have a better-than-usual chance of surviving in one piece. It was a bitter irony that where once R2-D2 had rolled in the wake of a brash young man, he now fled before the creature that man had become.

C-3PO’s wails, by comparison, were pathetic in their blindness. R2-D2 gave a noncommittal chirp and pushed past, drawing his flighty friend away from the architect of his mission and toward the escape pods. He calculated C-3PO would follow, albeit with much complaining.

“Wait a minute! Where are you going? You’re not permitted in there, it's restricted!”

Artoo beeped him a terse reply. He was a droid, and not prone to wishful thinking; but had he been able, he might have wished for a less silly companion. He ignored C-3PO’s exhortations and extended an arm to trigger the escape pod door controls.

“You’ll be deactivated for sure!”

Anyone who could have protested his willfulness was either dead or captured; the highest authority onboard had just told him to abandon ship. R2-D2 conveyed his disregard for C-3PO’s threat in the most eloquent--and succinct--manner possible.

“Don’t you call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease! Now come out before somebody sees you!”

R2-D2 established himself in the cockpit. It was an awkward fit, but needs must. It was a truth then, and little improved in recent years, that emergency matériel rarely considered inorganic needs, or even non-human configurations. While it bears mentioning that the _Tantive IV_ was crewed by humans and shipped out of a human-populated planet, the argument could also be made that a diplomatic vessel should endeavor to be more inclusive, even for structures as menial as the auxiliary escape pods. R2-D2 settled himself in, applied his scomp link, and beeped an altogether inadequate explanation. C-3PO was being very patient, considering.

Patient, but no less obstreperous. “Secret mission? What plans? What are you talking about? I’m not getting in there.”

A blaster zapped the wall by C-3PO’s head, a ricochet from a skirmish even then taking place at the other end of the hall. This sufficed to change his mind, and after waving his arms in dismay and venting a stream of “Oh, no!”s to the ceiling, he stepped into the escape pod, far too hesitantly for R2-D2’s taste--who had broached the ship’s computer and seen how far gone their ship truly was. He urged his companion to greater speed, for the Imperials were almost upon them.

“I’m going to regret this.”

The doors closed. The pod jettisoned.

 

VI. A Last Resistance

No sooner had the droids penetrated the depths of the escape pod hatchway, parting ways with the comforting light of the familiar, than a double brace of stormtroopers entered the maintenance tube. They blocked the only exit; they sought surviving passengers. This was an extension of the sweeps that were, even now, tearing apart the staterooms, ripping away the tapestries, overturning chairs and shattering antique vases, shredding the fine cushions of the couch for no other reason than that they could, and to show proof of their thoroughness to the exacting standards of their officers.

It was no stateroom they searched, now; it was a maintenance passage, narrow, enjambed with tanks of water and atmosphere. The smoke had largely cleared, following the trail of vents and air exchangers. What cover it may have offered was now spent, and shadows alone offered succor; it was not enough for the slender figure, clad in Alderaanian diplomatic white, to escape the stormtroopers’ notice.

“There’s one,” the lead trooper said. “Set for ‘stun.’”

Perhaps for any other prey this may have been the final blow, but this figure was no delicate stem, wilting beneath the weight of its blossom. Her hair was dark as oiled mahogany, her eyes a fierce, clear amber-brown; her cheek was soft as the dew, her lips like rose petals, her brow high and smooth. She moved with grace, her limbs strong and sturdy. Her voice was gentle when she spoke, but strong when she commanded. Her orders were not to be gainsaid; she gave them sparingly and wisely. Nineteen years had given her a bearing of forty-nine. She was no less than Senator Leia Organa, princess of the ruling house of Alderaan, and not lightly did another cross her. She raised a slender hand and a single bolt flew from her blaster. It landed, unerringly, in the weak point of the trooper’s breast plate. He fell; she ran.

Leia had counted upon the shock of her sudden attack to carry her to safety. It was not to be. Any other unit, with lesser troops than the heirs of Kamino’s sons, would have scattered in dismay; but Vader’s Fist was the best in the Imperial Army, one of the last remnants of a forgotten war, and the second in the column merely raised his blaster and fired a single stun round.

The fight so nobly begun came to an ignominious end. Leia collapsed to the deck in a sprawl, the blaster clattering beyond the reach of her nerveless fingers. A third trooper circled her fallen figure--curled in a comma, small and pale against the durasteel panels of the deck--to cut off further escape. She was surrounded.

“She’ll be alright,” the squad sergeant said. “Inform Lord Vader we have a prisoner.”

Understand, the pride and satisfaction he felt was not out of malicious ill-will toward his captive. If anything, he might have felt pity for her, a certain sense of “there but for the grace of my allegiances go I”; he bore her no personal enmity. But he also bore the expectation of superior performance upon his shoulders, and the perpetual doubt of his own skill beside the bred perfection of his predecessors. He longed for the security of a sterling reputation; while he did not know who, exactly, his new prisoner was, he suspected, not incorrectly, that she was of considerable value. Perhaps he would no longer have to fear for his family’s comfort.

They gathered her up, put her in binders, and injected her with a counter-agent to the stun. 

 

VII. In Which the Damage Appears Less Severe From a Distance

The pneumatic clank of the escape pod’s release shook through C-3PO’s body. R2-D2 sat at the controls, taking them to the planet surface; he whistled quietly to himself, tweaking the sound’s harmonics and his own internal resonances as he mangled a popular song down into noise data before building it back up again. The song was “Haidra’s Comet.” It was performed by the Goa Gang, although C-3PO did not remember this; it had fallen victim to his most recent memory wipe. He knew the tune very well, however; Midshipman Tondra Kee, his primary technician on the droid maintenance crew, was especially fond of the chorus, and she had sung it under her breath every day for a week.

C-3PO gazed through the porthole toward the remnants of the battle and their erstwhile home where it lay nestled against the belly of the star destroyer. A corona of vaporized water, vented atmosphere, and shattered hull fragments surrounded the scene. It seemed to be above them, an optical illusion enhanced by the positioning of the planet below. There was no up or down in space, no upside-down or right-side-up, no fixed point of reference against which to judge the position of another object relative to your own aside from “far” or “near,” along which axis, and by what distance. But it still seemed, C-3PO insisted to himself, as though the ships were above them, rather than beside or below them. The tableau shrank rapidly as the gravity well of the planet caught hold of the pod and magnified the thrust of its engines.

His optical receptors--indeed, those of any advanced droid--were superior to all but a select few species, namely the Besalisks, who could see targets up to three kilometers away in exquisite detail, and in the ultraviolet spectrum. The paired ships had passed beyond the range of ordinary organic sight, but C-3PO increased the zoom on his optics, reluctant to let them go, and saw, for the first time since the battle began, the exterior hull of the _Tantive IV_.

“That's funny,” he said in surprise. “The damage doesn't look as bad from out here.” He had imagined, given the tumults of their journey and its concluding battle, that the exterior of the ship would be a torn, unrecognizable heap of slag. Hardly so. If not for the absence of the comms antenna and the presence of a few carbon-smeared craters, the Tantive IV would have looked much the way it had at the start of their voyage.

A thought occurred to him: it was clear that the damage to the ship was of an internal nature. It was not outside the realm of possibility that some of the escape pod’s circuits had blown in the same surge that overloaded the shields. He turned away from the porthole and back to his friend. “Are you sure this thing is safe?”

R2-D2’s only reply was an electronic whistle of reassurance. It was _not_ reassuring. But then, R2-D2 was plugged into the systems port, and doubtless had a better feel for the escape pod than C-3PO did. If something was wrong he would surely say. Secure in this trust, C-3PO returned his attention to the falling ships. He let his mind wander.

He wasn’t certain of it, but he suspected he had very recently been subjected to a memory wipe. His short-term memory files were patchy, and on several occasions a crewmember had asked him a seeming _non sequitur_ only to imply he would have understood it a week prior. While memory wipes were unnerving, they were simply the lot of a droid, and as far as C-3PO could tell, given the degree to which his base personality had remained intact, he had been subjected to relatively few. Captain Antilles was a fair captain, in that respect. C-3PO could only surmise that he had witnessed a secret so profound that the only recourse for those involved was to silence as many voices as possible. He scrolled through what he knew of current events, searching for any mysterious treaties that had appeared _fait accompli_ , or what faction may have declared war on another. There was the Rebellion, of course, but C-3PO was barely associated with that absurd scheme. Captain Antilles was far too wise a man to embroil himself in a movement as foolhardy as that.

It was useless. There was nothing C-3PO could conceive of that he, a lowly protocol droid, could have been involved in to warrant a memory wipe. It must have been a truly spectacular accomplishment, he decided, sitting back a little. He imagined for a while, as the curvature of the planet rose to fill the edge of the porthole, his heroic actions around the edge of a negotiating table. The Clatear, maybe. They had long been enemies of the Nhoras. The head delegate from the Nhoras perhaps had insulted the leader of the Clatear and weapons were drawn; but C-3PO, human-cyborg relations, had intervened, and with a few well-chosen words, de-escalated the situation from all-out war. “The Peace-Maker,” they called him. Sadly, the Clatear had been resentful of a droid’s preeminence in the success of those efforts, and demanded his memory wiped. Captain Antilles had tearfully agreed.

This warmed his circuits until he was jarred back to awareness by their reentry into atmosphere. R2-D2 beeped fretfully for moment, then steadied the craft against the buffeting updrafts. A cloud of particles speckled against the hull; sand, C-3PO projected, upon seeing the vast desert below them. Above, the twinned ships had vanished into the stars, well past his ability to differentiate. He tried anyway. It seemed rude simply to _leave_ the vessel which had been his primary posting for almost twenty years without so much as a farewell. He was put in mind of a Hutt benediction, dredged from the profundities of his programming: “Glide among the stars, and never forget the earth beneath your foot.” They had left the solid ground of the familiar, and were passing into the cosmic winds of change.

Another thought occurred to him. “Do make it a smooth landing, Artoo. I'm not sure I can take much more of being tossed about.”

 

VIII. Frustrations, Failures and Twists of Fate

With a proud clatter, four stormtroopers escorted their prisoner through the halls of the captured Rebel ship. Even those of their number who preferred to watch the Outer Rim podraces than keep abreast of political events knew she was a prisoner of no little significance; she had an air of command that any soldier at the bottom of the chain would recognize. Lord Vader would be pleased. They surrounded her, two before, two behind, and escorted her through the halls. The chatter on the comms said Lord Vader was on the bridge, supervising the datamining of the ship’s logs; they bypassed the living quarters via service tunnels and entered the main corridor just as the black-armored form of Darth Vader emerged from the ship ops monitoring station, Commander Jir at his side. Their Lord Commander paused at the sight of the white-clad diplomat before him. Her face was familiar to him, plastered as it frequently was over the newsfeeds from Alderaan and a dozen other worlds for her humanitarian work, and in the Senate for her subtle protestations against the Emperor’s dictates. She walked a fine political line, especially for one so young; there were cultures that valued capability over age, and Leia, precocious, fierce, eminently capable, was the orphan in the chantry, the fresh bud that proved Erenna’s postulate. She reminded Vader of one he had known long ago, one he had known and loved, and the presence of this reckless girl before him felt like nothing so much as salt in a neglected, infected wound. He considered it a boon. Anger was his ally.

Leia Organa said, “Darth Vader. Only you could be so bold.” Her bearing was unaffected by her dire circumstances. She may well have been in the Senate itself, drawing forward to passionately declaim for the rights of the people. “The Imperial Senate will not sit still for this. When they hear you’ve attacked a diplomatic--”

“Don’t act so surprised, your highness,” Vader replied, amusement coloring his tone, as one might laugh at the spectacle of a Naboo tooke scolding a narglatch; but anger was there also, and frustration at having been thwarted by this spitfire woman’s stubborn support of the rabble calling themselves the Alliance. He was so close to silencing her painful voice and crushing Bail Organa’s uprising forever. All he lacked was the proof. “You weren’t on any mercy mission this time. Several transmissions were beamed to this ship by rebel spies; I want to know what happened to the plans they sent you.”

Leia, completely fearless, wide-eyed and altogether righteous: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m a member of the Imperial Senate, on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan!”

The audacity of this creature! Even in the face of overwhelming odds and certain death, she dared condemn him for interrupting a harmless mission. Vader felt the lies coiling through the Force, set deep and certain in his bones. She was desperate, reaching for any scrap of immunity she could gather close; that his claims lacked proof and hers seemed true merely infuriated Vader further. He thrust an accusatory finger in her face. “You’re a part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor! Take her away!”

She went with a defiance that scalded him with his own memories. Her head held high, her hair caught in a frivolous style, she seemed to regard the stormtroopers surrounding her as a personal escort, rather than guards. Vader followed her path for a time, then spun, his cape billowing out behind him. The server room was waiting. Its contents would either prove Princess Leia’s guilt--or render the ship obsolete.

He strode down the hall, and Commander Jir, following in his wake, took the opportunity to voice his opinion. Vader had felt it building ever since Jir first caught sight of the princess and experienced a flare of attraction, quickly snuffed. Vader let his anger simmer down to a slower boil. Daine Jir was a long-faced man, the human embodiment of a greyhound. When he now spoke, it was from as neutral a position as the man could hold, and Commander Jir could be exceptionally neutral when he chose to be. His clarity of thought was why Vader tolerated his interruptions. “Holding her is dangerous,” Jir said. “If word of this gets out, it could generate sympathy for the Rebellion in the Senate.”

Vader dismissed this concern with the confidence of a man placed well above the law. “I’ve traced the rebel spies to her. Now she is my only link to finding their secret base.”

“She’ll die before she’ll tell you anything!”

“Leave that to me. Send a distress signal, and then inform the Senate that all aboard were killed.”

They came upon the ship's server room. Nahdonnis Praji, chief of Torrent Company’s ground and boarding ops, was a forthright, almost blunt man. It was a trait Vader valued, among those who used it wisely. He was also an adept slicer. He stepped out into the hall to greet them. “Lord Vader? The battle station plans are not aboard this ship, and no transmissions were made.” He espoused the belief that bad news should be given quickly, the better to ease the sting. “An escape pod was jettisoned during the fighting, but no life forms were aboard.” 

The same intensity that had consumed Vader during the pursuit of the _Tantive IV_ flared anew. It was the determination of a thwarted hunter uncovering fresh spoor. In that moment, unbeknownst to either man, Jir and Praji simultaneously found themselves glad they were not being pursued by their Lord Commander. “She must have hidden the plans in the escape pod,” Vader said, half as an aside to Jir. To Praji, “Send a detachment down to retrieve them. See to it personally, Commander. There will be no one to stop us, this time.” 

The caesura that had settled in the aftermath of the capture disappeared. A flurry of activity surged through the star destroyer, Nahdonnis Praji at its source. A lander was requisitioned; a company was conscripted. The prisoners were summarily marked for execution and sent to interrogation chambers so their valuable information could be extracted before they met with the consequences of their misplaced loyalties. The Rebel droids, too, were interrogated, the ship’s finest slicers plugging into their delicate innards with a mandate to pry. Those that survived would have their memories erased. Some would stay aboard the _Devastator_ ; others would be distributed throughout the fleet. The rest would be released with the garbage.

As for the _Tantive IV_ , the ship was deboarded, scuttled, and blown apart by a barrage from the _Devastator_ ’s cannons. No evidence would remain of the Empire’s excessive use of force; the only explanation of the fate of the ship would be a falsified report from the survey vessel _Wide-Eyed_ , declaring the _Tantive IV_ had been caught in an asteroid storm, and all aboard lost. 

The _Devastator_ flew on.

 

IX. Planetfall

It was a bitterly dry planet. The searing heat of binary suns had already begun the work of melting C-3PO’s wire jackets, and they had barely made it twenty meters from the downed pod. Sand crept into the crevices of his feet; he allowed himself a cringe of horror. A single grain of sand, innocuous, insignificant, beneath concern, could get caught in a joint or wire cluster, or wind up pinched between his distal motor processors, and bring catastrophe. Now, he stood upon a veritable _sea_ of sand. A light breeze was blowing, casting even more grains against his plating. It was simply unfair. He would almost have preferred to remain on the doomed ship rather than face this.

Beside him, R2-D2 beeped an uncomplimentary opinion on the dust jamming his wheels.

“How did we get into this mess?” C-3PO mused. “I really don’t know how.” His mood turned even blacker. “We seem to be made to suffer. It’s our lot in life.”

R2-D2 gave an extended series of beeps, a small speech to the effect of “Don’t give up now.” It was C-3PO’s considered opinion that an astromech droid had no business being half as eloquent as his counterpart was.

Fine words or no, C-3PO was not in the mood to be comforted. “I’ve got to rest before I fall apart, my joints are almost frozen.”

His companion replied noncommittally, but he slowed when C-3PO did, and they paused to take in their surroundings: dunes, rising high enough to bury a starship beneath, dun-colored, glittering when the sun struck them, refracting the visible spectrum through C-3PO’s processors. No plants clung to their tops, or shadowed at their bases, or seemed to exist at all. Before them stood a gigantic swell of sand, impossible to summit--a venture C-3PO saw little reason to pursue. To the north advanced a threatening range of hills, jutting into ridges and imposing, needle-like escarpments. C-3PO could imagine the terrain over such a fearsome natural feature: he would gash himself open on the rocks with a single misstep. He might not even have feet left to step with, if he got them caught in a crevice. In the other direction, to the south, was more sand. A daunting prospect. Better sand, however, than uncertain footing. It is always easier to take the pain one knows over the pain one does not; it was so for C-3PO in that moment.

He said, “What a desolate place this is.”

R2-D2 gave a beep of agreement, but he, having scanned the terrain himself, and being directed by a mission rather than mere self-preservation, had come to an entirely different conclusion. He whistled for C-3PO’s attention and turned his fuselage northwards in clear suggestion.

The response was not favorable. C-3PO pulled up short, and when he spoke, it was in a tone of indignation. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Allow, for the moment, the author to translate R2-D2’s response from his customary beeps, whistles and trills, the better to convey his reply to this abrupt and somewhat obvious question. “This way,” perhaps he said, or maybe “North,” in the precise manner of astromech droids.

This was not sufficient to sway C-3PO, who replied, “Well I’m not going that way. It’s much too rocky. This way is much easier.” He gestured southwards, toward a landscape which would, in the short term, certainly be easier for both droids to traverse--especially R2-D2, who rode on wheels and was even less capable of negotiating rocks than C-3PO. “What makes you think there are settlements over there?”

The response to this was far beyond an organic’s ability to parse.

“Don't get technical with me,” C-3PO snapped, for his repertoire of programming, while vast, did not include triangulation or hydrology (it bears mentioning that R2-D2 was an experienced droid, and that this is sufficient explanation for his own unusual body of knowledge relative to the needs of a mechanic).

R2-D2’s reply was terse. He had explained this before; perhaps not as well as he might have, but he had gotten them away from a war zone, and that alone should have put him in C-3PO’s good graces.

It was not to be. “What mission?” his golden counterpart demanded. “What are you talking about?”

A deep frustration settled in R2-D2’s joints. (The question of whether it was “real” frustration, while an engrossing and contentious philosophical debate, is too lengthy to address here.) Time was pressing, and R2-D2’s patience was running short. He replied in a manner that left aside politeness in favor of expressing his frank opinion of C-3PO’s reticence.

C-3PO was already in a rigid posture by virtue of his construction; had he hair, he would have bristled. “I’ve just about had enough of you,” he spat. “Go that way! You’ll be malfunctioning within a day, you nearsighted scrap-pile!” He kicked R2-D2’s nearest leg, raising a hollow, metallic clank that seemed louder amid the lifeless silence around them. “And don’t let me catch you following me, begging for help, because you won’t get it.” He began a southward march, kicking up sand as he went.

This was an altogether unexpected turn-about. R2-D2 was not a sentimental droid, not next to C-3PO, who carried sentiment in spades; he was chiefly a mechanic. He, if such an organic turn of phrase could be applied to an inorganic being, thought first and felt later. But R2-D2 was an old droid, and he had developed a number of quirks that brought him to be more than the mere sum of his programming; he was attached to C-3PO, in all of his fussy, fretful, oblivious ways. He pointed his visual scanner after his friend, then toward the distant mountains in the opposite direction. It was a dilemma altogether unwanted. Did he complete his mission--not a venture lightly cast aside--or did he remain with C-3PO, with whom he had shared many adventures and many dull days, as well? If they parted, at this time, in this place, in this way, they would likely never see each other again. A cruel choice. But the weight of duty intervened, and R2-D2 was decided. He turned north. Lest the reader assume it was his nature as a droid--unfeeling, mechanical--that turned him from his friend, it behooves the author to repeat, for the sake of emphasis, that R2-D2 loved C-3PO no less for having made his choice, and had he a heart it would have been torn in two. Wiser men than he had been ruined upon the horns of such a dilemma; rather than condemn him for being a droid, respect instead his ability to let go. Without it, there would be no story.

Yet even so, with his choice made and his course set, he did not straight away turn and steer towards the mountains. He hesitated a little, and gave a last, plaintive whistle.

The reply was firm. “No more adventures. I’m not going that way.”

This final renunciation sufficed. R2-D2 let go his last hope of C-3PO accompanying him, and while it was not an entirely graceful parting--the little astromech saw fit to throw a muttered stream of invective in C-3PO’s wake, to soothe his own hurt--it was nevertheless a very final one. R2-D2 turned northwards, following his programmed coordinates and dead reckoning, and made for the badlands. He strove against his rising apprehension by singing songs to himself, to banish the silence left without his companion at his side.

 

X. C-3PO’s Journey

It is an impossibility to describe the furnace-heat of binary suns at midday. They struck the upper atmosphere of the planet with twinned fury, as of a titan smiting it with two fists clenched, and though filtered by those layers of gas envelope, fell to the sandy, blasted rock with the might of ancients. A rain of light, almost physical in its weight, parching the eye and forcing the breath from one’s lungs at the sheer impossibility of such heat.

C-3PO did not have skin to crisp beneath this unforgiving day, nor delicate mucous membranes to wither from the punishing dryness, but nonetheless he suffered. His gold plating, more decorative than functional, only partially reflected the sun, and grew warmer the farther he went. No shade soothed the oven of his own body. He was not individually aware of the slow softening of the plastic sheathing over his wires, but the heat dissipators on his motor servos no longer sufficed, and the coolant running through his verbobrain hardly merited the term. He had walked for three hours, perhaps longer, and his pace grew ever slower as he overheated, his joints stiffening from the ever-present sand. 

Sand. As far as the visual sensor could see, arching like waves frozen in time, rippling into the distance. C-3PO ventured over this empty sea, stripped bare of any sign of life. A gust rose from the east, brushing a cap loose from the crest of a dune, sweeping it into the air like a dun-colored cloud. He spoke aloud to keep himself from feeling his melting circuitry, or the chilling scrape in his joints, or his loneliness, or the depth of his error. “How terrible an existence it is, to be a droid! Made, used, then discarded on the nearest scrap-heap, or better yet, tossed into a sandpit to be worn away to nothing. I'm never going to get this mess out, I'll be carrying sand until it scratches away my conductive nodes and I can't carry anything, not even myself. I'll be stuck, stricken with silicate. I can't walk! What am I doing! Each step I take only worsens the damage! And the heat, by the Maker, I am melting. The plastic will slough off my wires and corrode my processors. Grounding will be lost. I will electrocute myself as I walk. Goodbye, self! My data will vanish in a shower of sparks. All that will be left is a metal husk, my wires used to line a dozen nests--if there is any animal so unfortunate as to live on this burned cinder. My plating, turned to scrap. Scratched, pitted, corroded. A grave: here once was a droid, who is no more.”

He crested a hill, and saw upon its summit, curving with the flows of sand, a titanic skeleton, aged and bleached white, of some lizard-like monster. It seemed a fitting counterpoint to C-3PO’s misery. How he missed his friend, in that moment!

“That malfunctioning little twerp. This is all his fault. He tricked me into going this way. But he’ll do no better.”

He turned back to the north. There was nothing there to see but more sand; his righteousness and indignation had carried him far. He cursed himself for his stubbornness. The route through the mountains may not have been an easier path, but he would not have been alone. Here, beneath the desolation of earth and sky, he was confronted by his own foibles, and in the manner of besieged soldiers and naughty children, swore he would amend his ways if he could but be spared his horrible fate. He returned to his chosen course, the petard upon which he had hoisted his pride.

His eye caught on a fleck of darkness, an imperfection against the hard perfection of sand and sky. It was roughly a parallelogram in shape, black against the pale ridge it stood upon; C-3PO stared for a moment in confusion. It was a mirage, he thought, a _fata morgana_ : nothing more than a vision brought on by the uneasy mingling of temperature and humidity. But then he beheld a flickering at its peak, too constant to be a hallucination. It was a bright white flashing, as of the suns reflecting off glass, or a signal beacon.

It came closer under its own power, and that was the proof. It was a vehicle, not the product of a malfunctioning processor. C-3PO felt the hope of a drowning man spotting a ship, of a victim of starvation finding a loaf of bread. He raised his hands and blessed his metal plating, once his doom but now, in the reflection of light, his salvation.

“Over here! Hey! Hey! Help! Please help!”

 

XI. R2-D2’s Journey

It is nothing less than the very right of a setting sun to place its final claim upon the worlds it illuminates, to impel upon the thoughts a last memory of its might, that it will be missed. It does so in as poignant a manner as possible, the final gaze of its eye lingering on whichever structures it might espy, casting them first in a fading yellow that turns to chased gold--the period of ethereal light, the golden hour, whereby the dying sun bestows a layer of gilding upon even the meanest of sights. Thereafter the world loses the grace and definition granted by its celestial king, and slips into shadow.

No different was it for this unnamed planet upon which R2-D2 found himself. Indeed, the effect was magnified and lengthened by the presence of two stars. Not only was there a golden hour--a little earlier, as the smaller yellow star sank first toward the horizon, casting its warm hues upon the bare rock--but a silver hour as well as its younger, larger, white sibling fell, striking the atmosphere at that angle which promotes the diffusion of light into a fleeting limn. First they washed the land gold, then they washed it argent, then carmine, and last, before the fluttering aurora settled, they spilled over with umber and indigo. Evening descended; night fell. Shadows shifted and pooled, drifting where they might in the lingering throes of day, spilling to and fro in every hollow and crevice, behind every promontory. The dunes stretched mile upon mile in ribbons of alternating gold and black; the salt pans glowed pink. But the rocky fissures into which R2-D2 descended, these were twilight gray, their hue leeched away by Kavaan’s lowering cloak.

The little droid made his stalwart way between the rocks, his single sensor eye roving without cease. He could see far more than an organic could, but the shadows loomed ever-larger, and not even he could escape the discomfort of the unknown. His existence was to make clear the concrete and straightforward for his masters, and for him to peer into darkness and see nothing, yet still feel the sensation of foreign eyes peering back--it was not an easy state to accept.

The ravine in which he found himself rolling was about five meters across, smooth along the bottom, a relic of this planet’s watery past. A layer of dust and sand had since accumulated, burying any sharp obstacles and packing down into a smooth plane through the passage of time. The sides of the canyon were rough stone, unmarked by mineral deposits. No banners of limestone or gypsum white climbed toward an invisible flash-flood line; and thus, spared the fickleness of nature, the wash had become something of a highway for the local species. 

And there _were_ local species. Tiny, glowing eyes peered out from between the edges of the wadi, behind boulders and inside caves. R2-D2 heard the burble of their voices and the sweep of their robes over stone. They were quiet. They were scavengers, and knew how not to attract the attention of larger beings who might deal them a severe blow. Their strength lay in numbers, and in their ability to strike quickly, with surprise on their side. R2-D2 had never met them directly, but he had heard tales of them; and if the scurrying shapes he caught on the edges of his scopes were anything to judge, he would be meeting them sooner rather than later.

Now, a moment of quandary: did he resist, or did he allow them to claim him? Not an easy choice. Had he been at C-3PO’s side, it would have been simple: yield, and protect his vulnerable friend. But he was on his own, now, and he was not without his defenses. Let us consider the debate that went on inside his processor in those tense moments.

He had a mission, given to him by no less than his commanding officer and the descendant of his first owner. It was a mission of the utmost importance; time was of the essence. Delays were unwelcome. Lives were at stake. R2-D2 carried within him information that could tip the balance between those lives’ continuance or their sudden ending. The coordinates he had been given were not so very far away, he calculated; perhaps fifty kilometers northwest, as the crow flies. 

But he was not a crow; he was a droid, and the terrain was unfamiliar. Already his mechanical parts were stiffening from the sand. His wheels rolled unwillingly, and his sensor eye couldn't rotate without catching against dust deposits. Fifty kilometers was a simple enough prospect for a being that both knew the route and could clean the fouling from its gears, but R2-D2 had been built with the expectation that technicians would always be close at hand, and that the worst environmental insult to which he would be exposed was the vacuum of space. If he wished to survive to make it to his destination, he would have to make allowances for his weaknesses. It was not a pleasant admission.

All at once a brown-cloaked figure, no more than a meter tall, jumped out from behind a rock with a jabbering screech and aimed an EMP shocker at R2-D2’s squat body. It was good that R2-D2 had made his peace with the thought of capture, for it happened entirely without warning. An electricity-deadening pulse ran through him, shutting down every system it found; he gave an electronic scream of dismay, then gibbered senselessly as his shut-down protocols took over and locked him into sleep. His final act, as the dusty little creatures closed in, was a reedy moan of protest. He went up on two legs and keeled over forward, landing against bare stone with an ignominious thunk.

The tiny beings clustered about him like nunas around new-fallen seed, exulting in their capture of so fine and new a droid. There was some carbon grit charred into its silver and blue shell, but there wasn't a hint of sandblasting over its paint, and it had rolled easily, relative to the desperate straits in which many a mechanical device found itself after as little as a single season upon this sandy ball. Their leader, one named Dathcha, was the steadiest among them. He directed their positions, augmenting his words with emotional reinforcement carried by scent.

“Yeelhoy, [nephew mine, shortsighted one], pick up _that_ end. It will be too heavy for Ukchet.”

“Aiiee, what a prize [excitement, greed]!”

“[PAIN] You're pinching my hand!”

“How much will the [water smell] big folk buy it for?”

“What if the [grease, burnt ions smell] big folk want it! It's a [grease, burnt ions smell] droid!”

“The [mucous, rot smell] big folk will steal it if we are not careful.”

“[Grease, exhaust, salvage piles, scent markings, roasting squill] _Home_ ,” Dathcha said firmly, luring them on.

The Jawas--for these little creatures, indeed, were Jawas--clustered about R2-D2, lifting him and carrying him down the wash. Their sandcrawler was parked at the edge of an escarpment in a narrow valley that cut through the mountains. The home lights were on, illuminating the cockpit, control room, and the side hatchway. Dathcha gave the halloo, his voice echoing off the rock, and his hunting party shouted in triumph behind him. It had been a most profitable hunt! Cries from the sandcrawler greeted them. Dathcha led the party as they shuffled the heavy astro droid over the rocky terrain, and then over the treacherous footing of a sand drift. The loading ramp descended. The hunting party lowered R2-D2 and tilted him upright.

“Ezjenk [respect, trust], bolt the droid.”

Ezjenk spoke rarely. He said nothing now as he pulled a restraining bolt and welder from his bandolier and stooped before the powered-down droid. A small shower of sparks later, the droid was properly captured, unable to leave a twenty-five meter radius of the sandcrawler unless the bolt code was transferred to a new owner or the distances manually altered. This surgery complete, Ezjenk stepped back to make way for the repulsorlift tube.

It was a simple device. The astro droid was positioned beneath it, and when its sensors detected a mass within range, powerful repulsors activated to suck the droid up, as neat as a pea up a straw. The operator, positioned just inside the loading hatch, raised the tube back into its housing and the hunting party scampered up the sandcrawler’s ramp. There were a dozen tasks to do before they could get under way: the engines had to be primed, the new cargo properly stowed, the treads and gears checked, the course laid in and verified. The Jawas made this circuit a hundred times or more a year, but as Nebit was fond of saying, “[Foolish, complacent] blindness brings [lack of sympathy] bare bones.”

 

XII. Reunited

The interior of the sandcrawler was hot, and the air close, pressing in against the face as though intent on suffocation. It stank of metal ore and Jawa, a scent itself composed of roughly equal parts of body odor, urine, heavy pheromones, and rotting food. R2-D2 was deposited in the pile of scrap surrounding the repulsorlift opening; an undignified arrival, landing as he did upon the bare sheet metal of what had once been a speeder carapace and which now served as an informal doorbell to inform the greedy residents that new treasure had arrived. He was collected, indecently pawed at, squabbled over, and finally tipped into another scrap heap as though he were an old carapace himself, instead of a highly capable (and exceptionally valuable) R2 unit. Those who are greediest quite often forget what they have in favor of what they don't; the Jawas consigned R2-D2 to the scrap heap of their memories, and left him to his devices.

His devices were mostly inert. Still stunned by the EMP, he was mindless of his precarious perch--half-reclined against a stack of tarps more dust than cloth--and of the tuft of shredded metal that had gathered atop his dome. Beneath his dead exterior, a lone emergency protocol logged in his boot sequence and, finding his software undamaged, woke R2-D2 from his stupor. He rocked upright, scattering trash, blasting his dismay. He took in his new environs.

It was a low-ceilinged chamber, perhaps one-point-seven meters in height. Beyond this, R2-D2 could tell nothing, by virtue of the teetering piles of junk stacked carelessly about and his own diminutive height, which rendered him unable to peer over them. His scanners, too weak to penetrate the heavy durasteel panels, scattered back through the junk piles until the interference grew so heavy it drove his readings into static. Truly, it was a miserable, cramped little area. R2-D2 shuffled forward to see what he might make of the lay of this particular land.

He was close to the outer edge of the chamber, near a wall. A narrow trench cut through the heaps of scrap, and following this path, R2-D2 found himself surrounded by droids of every imaginable ilk. Almost all were sandblasted; many were beyond repair, and sat like broken dolls awaiting a tender hand that would never come. A GNK droid sat directly opposite, its bulk blocking the continuance of the trench; it _gnk_ ed sadly to itself as the sandcrawler ground to life. Another R2 unit, red, constructed with a conical head rather than R2-D2’s own graceful dome, was propped against a bulkhead, dormant and senseless.

“So you woke up, then,” a battered RA-7 droid said in Huttese, sounding as though this was an affront to decency and good manners.

R2-D2 noticed the restraining bolt against the droid’s chestplate. A thin ring of grime and verdigris had collected around the edges of it, declaring the length of this droid’s imprisonment. R2-D2 could feel the electronic weight of the bolt on his own fuselage, glaring into his programming like an evil eye, awaiting any hint of wrongdoing.

“Your sensor will fall out if you keep staring,” the RA-7 droid added, but in a much more uncomplimentary fashion, making ample use of the agglutinative capacity of Huttese to concoct an insult of astonishing specificity. R2-D2 felt it best to leave this bitter, argumentative droid alone, and continued his reconnaissance with a minimum of fuss.

By this time, the decrepit engines of the sandcrawler had been fully coaxed awake, and the massive treads began their slow forward crawl. The ride was far from smooth. R2-D2 was obliged to engage the magnetic clamps on his wheels to keep from being tossed sideways from every rutted hole over which they passed. A tremendous vibration settled in as the Jawa engineers reached their cruising speed, shaking and clattering the cargo hold until R2-D2 felt so tossed about he suspected he would have to realign his carousel when they stopped. His innards were durable, but they were easily thrown into disarray, and in the interest of reaching his scomp link when he queued it instead of his taser, R2-D2 kept them rigidly organized.

“Artoo?” A voice came through the gloom, so familiar it made R2-D2’s pathways surge. He swiveled about, searching for the source, a frantic, almost manic air to his movements. _There_. A golden droid stood two aisles over, bracing himself against the jouncing of the transport. Had R2-D2 organic eyes, they would have widened in astonishment.

“Artoo-Detoo, it is you, it _is_ you!”

It was none other than C-3PO, the very friend he had thought lost. The confluence of fate that had brought them to this juncture was as probable as the dead rising to walk once more among the living. In past eras they might have called it a vergence in the Force: an event so large, and so significant despite its humble appearance, that the Universe would self-correct to ensure its outcome, no matter the circumstances or the choices of those involved. C-3PO was meant to be on this sandcrawler, as was R2-D2; there was no other possibility for them than to walk this path.

R2-D2 whistled happily, unaware of the gravity of his future. An ugly bolt clung to his counterpart’s chestplate, but C-3PO looked otherwise unharmed, dust aside. “You won’t believe the time of it I’ve had,” C-3PO said, and R2-D2 settled in to listen, warmed by the joy of reunion and that breed of nostalgia which permits and even encourages those behaviors that, on any normal day, would irritate.

The sandcrawler rattled into the twilight, hauling the droids to their destinies.

 

XIII. The Jawas of Nebit’s Clan

Enjikket had heard stories of his uncle Dathcha ever since he was a youngling, sitting beside his brother at Apa’s knee. Apa would hold them thrilled for hours, the scents of his narration mingling with Ama’s deb-deb tea. After-dinner smells mingled with sleepy smells, and the commingled scent marks of the family in their little nook. Beyond, a wash of Clan smells, blending together in the heart of the fortress. _Safety. Full bellies. Good haul._ Jawas had simple wants, and for Enjikket, the bedtime stories of his father and the soothing teas of his mother were all he needed.

But for Uncle Dathcha, he knew, the walls of the Clan Fortress were not enough. For Uncle Dathcha, only the wide desert would do.

He did not think Apa would like it, if he knew just how much his sons enjoyed his stories of his wayward brother. He would speak of the scoundrel Nebit, brazen in a way Jawas should never be, and disdain would color Apa’s scent. He never seemed to notice the longing that underpinned his sons’. Late at night, when the Clan had fallen silent and the coils of Ama’s heater had faded to a barely-visible glow, Enjikket would turn to his brother Yeelhoy and they would dream of running away from the fortress to find Uncle Dathcha and the fabled chieftain Nebit, and together they would brave Sand People and Humans and krayt dragons aboard their sandcrawler, and they would be the greatest Jawas in all the clans.

These were the dreams of little boys. Whole clans certainly could fit in a single sandcrawler, but the wisest ones chose not to; fortresses were safer, especially for weak females. These were dreams of those too young to understand the dangers of the desert and just how very small a Jawa was against them. Perhaps this was why their father did not notice his sons’ persistent daydreaming; he, too, had been young once, and remembered well--too well, said those who knew him--the pull of derring-do, and the wish to bring Jawas to a bolder, more respected stage. But that was many years ago, and Yeelhoy the Elder had two young children and a wife to feed. He manned the sandcrawlers, he harvested scrap, he meekly resold it, and he told scathing tales of his older brother to boys too young to see them as anything but heroic.

Time passed, and the boys grew. The eldest, Yeelhoy, was levelheaded, and Enjikket, the youngest, was clever. Enjikket followed his brother in most things, but in the case of their fantasies, Enjikket led. “Here,” he said, offering Yeelhoy a bleached length of bone. “This is your [pretense, excitement] lightsaber.”

“[Confusion, caution] Why do I need a lightsaber?”

“[Exasperation, hope] Because you're a Jedi.”

“[Increased caution, wariness, Clan Chief scent, Shaman scent, superstition] But I’m not a Jedi!”

“[Disappointment, annoyance] We’re pretending, Yeelhoy.”

“[Fear, disdain] We’re [Clan smells] Jawas. We don't fight.”

“[Determination] Then we’ll learn. Come on, take the lightsaber!”

“[Weakening resolve, curiosity] It’s just an old bone. A [musk, danger, death] _krayt_ bone.”

“[Exasperation, cajoling] It’s [dusty] dead, it’s not going to eat you.”

“[Yielding, curiosity, growing excitement] Fine. I’ll play Jedi with your [covetousness] stupid bone.”

Enjikket would not let the dream of joining Dathcha’s clan die. When they came to their third swap meet, when Yeelhoy was twelve and Enjikket was ten, they met Uncle Dathcha in person, and it was a meeting that stood bright in their hearts.

The clan meeting and swap meet was hectic. It was traditional to hold it in a dell by the edge of the Western Dune Sea, between two sheltering spurs of rock from the foothills, where an outpouring of springs veiled the face of the cliff. There was fodder here most of the year; those clans with rontos made good money from them, for they grew fat off the pasture.

Storm season was approaching. Already the skies were settling into the matte, dessicated blue of the driest time of year, the horizon rising up in a polished bronze haze as the ever-present k’tni winds plucked at the dunes. When they grew strong enough, these winds--always from the southeast, always whining fit to drive a being mad--would stir the sand from its bed in a ferocious gale, strong enough to strip the flesh from any creature so unfortunate as to be exposed. Whole settlements disappeared in the k’tni storm season. Oases were swallowed up; treasures lost or, more rarely, uncovered. No Jawa but the poorest or most desperate braved the storm season in a sandcrawler. They would burrow into their fortresses and let the wind pass them by.

But before that dismal stretch of time descended, they held their swap meet. Enjikket tumbled from the open bay of his Apa’s sandcrawler, with a few credit chips and a small weather vane he had beaten back into shape for barter, and explored the tumult of scents, sounds, and sights to behold.

A marriage was being consummated two sandcrawlers over. He could smell squill and honey, the elation of the congregants, and the arousal of the married parties. Enjikket himself grew aroused at the scent, but pushed it away, concentrating on the smells of rust and hot durasteel on the power coil he was examining.

It was a fact of life among a species as scent-reliant as the Jawas that there were no secrets. And so, there were few of the social taboos that other, more private races protected. Sex was one of these. While discretion was appreciated, as not everyone wished to smell their fellow clansmen’s arousal, weddings, by tradition, were consummated after the vows, and it was not unusual for the wedding party to devolve into an orgy. Enjikket thought that was all rather bothersome, though fascinating--as one might be fascinated by maggots picking over a corpse, or a terrific speeder crash. The latter was arguably _more_ compelling, as a wreck at least held promise of salvage. He was very young.

Jawas are, by nature and by enculturation, timid creatures, descended from prey animals and therefore as shy and prone to alarm as durni. Had this been their only virtue, it is doubtful Jawas would ever have become known to the larger galaxy; as it was, their easy fear was balanced by their love of salvage--a love matched only by scavenger hawks, whose nests were so famously deep that it was in the nest of the Atrenian hawk that Vinchus found the folly of Husiar. For the mere hope of a shiny piece of scrap, a swarm of Jawas would dare the wilds beyond their fortresses, and then sell, resell, and foist it off on others until there was nothing left but the rust. Even then a Jawa would not cast it aside, for the task of a Jawa, and indeed, their guiding precept, was “not to look for uses in a salvaged item, but rather to imagine someone else who might find a use for it.”

Such was the guiding principle of the swap meet. The first day was for looking, it was said; the second day was for haggling, and the third day was for making deals. The first day, Enjikket ran about from stall to stall, scenting and talking with other Jawas from other clans.

“[Pride] I talked with the head scout from Clan Darshyechulo, today,” he told his brother that night as they lay curled in their sleep pouches. “[Hope, eagerness, anticipation] He said they were looking for apprentices.” They were pressed together, suspended from the walls of the sandcrawler. Enjikket’s most precious belongings hung on the tough canvas of his cocoon, within easy reach and visible only to him: his macrobinoculars; a shard of lightning-struck sand, coiled and beautiful; the filigreed faceplate of a custom droid, adorned with bits and bobs of beads; the comlink his mother had given him.

Yeelhoy was unimpressed. “[Dismissiveness, smugness] That is nothing. _I_ spoke with [fearsome, cunning] Hkit Ngar,” he said. “He said my rebuilt droid brain was superior.”

Enjikket let out a scent-burst of outrage and envy. He felt the outline of his brother’s body in the pouch next to him, wriggling in self-satisfied glee.

“[Annoyance, amusement] Boys,” Apa said, his sharp edges softened by sleep. “Go to sleep.”

The next day, he brought them to see Uncle Dathcha. It was an overawing meeting. Dathcha bore the smells of the open desert, away from the scent-marked trails Jawas trusted. He moved in an easy, wiry walk, and he exuded quiet confidence that, had the boys been older, would have smacked of arrogance. He was Nebit’s head scout, and he was proud of his clan.

They sat in the shadow of Dathcha’s sandcrawler, upon a blanket woven by Apa’s and Dathcha’s ama. They spoke skills, ages, and prices; had Enjikket been older, or had Yeelhoy been less distracted by his younger brother’s restlessness, they might have paid more mind to their elders’ conversation, for it concerned their future. As it was, the second time Enjikket threw a rock at his brother, and the third time Yeelhoy admonished him, Apa sent them from the meeting rug and told them to amuse themselves. He was displeased; their behavior reflected poorly upon him and his parenting. His elder brother was an enigma to him, and more than a little intimidating; he would not be here if he had any surer option.

Dathcha, meanwhile, was watching his nephews with interest. He held the minimum of respect for his little brother, as demanded by blood and the custom of the meeting mat. Yeelhoy the Elder was the ideal Jawa: a shrewd bargainer, a profitable scavenger, and above all, cautious. Dathcha did not care overmuch for the last of those traits. He had staked his life and career on the rejection of it, as far as a Jawa could. He watched his nephews chase each other around the speeder engine blocks, waving sticks at each other and looking full of adventure, and he decided perhaps he could be more lenient towards his little brother, hobbled though he was by tradition and his own fear. Nebit needed apprentices if his clan was to succeed, and Dathcha thought that his two nephews might have the spark they sought.

Later they ate lunch with Dathcha at Apa’s sandcrawler, the scent of roasted hubba gourd thick in the air, and Dathcha regaled them with his adventures. These were both like and unlike the stories they knew: in them, Dathcha was bold, and free of the thread of envious disdain his brother spun. Enjikket sat enthralled.

Enjikket had thought he would never sleep that night, too full of the excitement of the meet; but his excitement exhausted him, and he fell into a doze against his father's side. The light of the campfire (a real fire, just for the occasion, kindled from dried ronto pats) glowed warm and soothing against his face, and the low, gentle cadence of Apa’s conversation with his fellow clansmen lulled him to sleep. He woke briefly when Apa picked him up to put him to bed, and with the innocent trust of children, wrapped in the strong embrace and infinite love of his father, he fell back asleep, at peace with his world.

Apa’s scent was strange, the next morning. He smelled the way he had when Kemapa had died, or the way he sometimes did when he spoke of Uncle Dathcha: sad, and a little lonely. He bade them eat breakfast quickly, sending them to gather their belongings ere the last gourd was eaten, and stepped out into the light of the second-rise, well before the meet’s third-day agreements began.

A low wind was rising from the south, dancing over the plain and swaying the canopies that stood over the heaps of salvage. The sky had settled into the bronze haze of the k’tni; the swap meet would end soon, all clans running back to the safety of their fortresses before the first sun went to ground. Enjikket followed in his father’s wake. They were nearly halfway to Dathcha’s sandcrawler when Enjikket began to suspect. Not long after, it was Yeelhoy who asked, his voice high in the last clear tones of childhood:

“[Suspicion, wild hope, guardedness] Did you apprentice us, Apa?”

“[Melancholy, pride, worry] You will see, my sons.”

Indeed, he brought them back to the sandcrawler that Nebit, Nekchit’s son, had claimed, and Uncle Dathcha was waiting for them, an ion gun at his belt and his eyes glowing fierce as the suns.

“[Respect, formality] You have fine sons, Little Brother,” Dathcha said. He smelled of honey, flatbread and tea. He smelled of the empty desert and the wind that blew. “They will be good additions.”

“[Rote recitation, comfort, sadness] You will care for their welfare and their training?”

“[Impatience, graciousness] They are my heart-sons. My work is theirs; their triumphs, my pride. [Challenge] They will be fine warriors.”

Yeelhoy the Elder’s disapproval was strong in the air, but so was his desperation. His regret. His hope, chagrin, and resolution. Enjikket had never scented such a raw burst from his father before. It was customary to restrain one’s scents, insofar as possible, for the sake of manners; Apa must truly have been troubled, to let his sons smell so freely the riot of conflicting emotions he held within.

Dathcha’s scent grew gentler, less prickly. “[Reassurance, amusement] They will only be in the next clan over,” he said. “We are not utterly divorced from the old ways.”

“[Sternness, sorrow] As per our agreement.”

“[Concordance, closure] As we agreed.”

They pressed their wrists scent-gland-down on the imprinting flimsi, and that was that. The bargain was sealed. Two boys’ futures decided, and one man saved from financial ruin. All Enjikket knew or cared, however, was that he was grown enough for the fabled Apprenticeship to start, and that his father was mortal as the rest of all Jawas. He reveled in the former; he stared uncomprehendingly at the latter until it retreated from his conscious mind, there to hide until perspective unpacked the memory.

Dathcha took them into his care with brusque efficiency, a calm, sardonic aura about him that was drastically different from Apa’s tense equilibrium or Ama’s meekness and deference. He chuckled as they gobbled up the sight of their new home. It was identical to their old one in all ways except those that mattered.

This was the seat of Clan Pukchaweeshka, the renegade clan. Nebit son of Nekchit was its chief. Enjikket knew from his father’s stories and from hearsay that Dathcha was highly-ranked in the hierarchy, Nebit’s third-in-command and scout leader. They would be well-positioned, for all that they were younglings yet.

It was a fine match, to the boys’ minds, though not many other Jawas would see it that way. Indeed, not even their father approved; but as he had lost money gambling, and needed parts for the sandcrawler, and as salvage was proving hard to find that year, he was in desperate want of money. Selling the training rights of his children on short notice was the best option he had. The training of young Jawas was a sacred duty, and thus a competitive market. Parents could demand whatever price for their training rights they felt suitable, and if the relationship between buyer and seller was favorable, they could more often get it than not. Even in this giving market, Yeelhoy had despaired. The boys were too flighty for anyone unknown, and they were on the young side for apprentices; few knew them outside of the clan. Those that _did_ know them also knew of Yeelhoy the Elder’s financial straits. He had carefully drawn up a list and gone through it methodically, and concluded that, though it was a distasteful thought, Clan Pukchaweeshka was as desperate for apprentices as he was for money. Furthermore, his brother lived there, and was well-placed; he could care for the boys. His own memories of Dathcha’s patience and good humor convinced him; if he had to part with his sons, better they go to a patient teacher, even if that teacher’s views were foolish. It is the burden of a parent to make difficult choices for the sake of their children; whether Yeelhoy’s selfishness outweighed his sons’ future wellbeing was a matter of debate. Yeelhoy told himself they would be well-suited to Nebit’s Clan--they were so bold, so whimsical--and tried to make his selfishness into altruism by the alchemy of guilt.

The boys knew nothing of this. They gave their father hugs, sweet and fizzing with happy smells, and bounded away to join their new training master. They would see their parents once a year, during the swap meet; when their training was done, they would be able to decide what to do with their lives--whether to return to their birth clan, permanently join their training clan, or something else altogether. For them, this was a fresh beginning, untainted by mistakes or animosities.

Dathcha welcomed them with open arms. He disdained the circumstances behind their arrival, and lost another notch of respect for his little brother; one more among many. But the boys were bright, and they were eager for adventure. Time would tell if that restlessness would translate into courage and audacity. Besides, the imprudence of their father was not their own. He led them around the side of the Pukchaweeshka sandcrawler and watched them carefully, scenting their wakes. This moment would be telling.

Return now to childhood and picture, through that ephemeral, impressionable, and above all gracious eye, the sight which these two young boys saw: the open hatch of a sandcrawler, illuminated by slanting morning sunslight; a bustle of Jawas flocking up and down the ramp, their smells strange and unison, each in his robe of brown wool which covered every inch of flesh from the harsh environment. Their eyes glowed from the darkness of their hoods, two dozen fierce bright eyes, capturing in miniature the blaze of the suns overhead. Their voices, high and chattering over the tumult of packing, seemed like the voices of timbrels and flutes. And there, at the top of the ramp, aloof and distant and stern, was a vision unlike any Enjikket and Yeelhoy had seen: a Jawa in a dusty, sturdy robe, holding at his side a blaster rifle almost as tall as he was, the butt of it planted mightily against the decking, held out at a calculated angle of nonchalant vigilance. This Jawa, surely bravery personified, watched over the toiling Jawas with the distant benevolence of Imchek, but with a ferocity to his scent, discernible even from a distance among so many others, that stung the nose. This was a chieftain like no other. This could only be Nebit, the Rebel Jawa. The hearts of the two young apprentices soared, drawn from the depths of their imaginations and childish dreams; and, having flown through uncertain winds, alighted upon Chief Nebit and found all their hopes assured. It was the naïveté of youth. It was heady and intoxicating as deb-deb wine. Dathcha ushered them up the ramp into Nebit’s presence, and even Enjikket, who rarely sat still or quiet, let alone both simultaneously, stared motionless up at him.

“[Respect, amusement, satisfaction] May I present my [disdain] brother’s children as apprentices?”

Nebit looked down at them. His scent was preoccupied; there was storm-sign on the horizon, and he wanted the sandcrawler heading toward Motesta before it hit. “They are young,” he said to Dathcha.

“[Reassurance] They will learn.”

Nebit nodded and returned his attention to the loading. This acknowledgement thus bestowed, he paid no more mind to the overawed younglings projecting near-worship into the air.

From such humble beginnings to such heights of ecstasy. The two boys were energized from even this small acknowledgment; they could barely walk as Dathcha led them into the belly of the transport.

One sandcrawler was much like another in basic construction. An ore hold built before an ore crusher and ore smelter, which sat before a sturdy reactor and powerful engines; atop this, living quarters and the command pod. It was a byzantine design, every last inch of space given to some use; in the hands of the Jawas, these mass-produced monsters became as different inside as they were uniform outside. No two hallways, inhabited by different Jawas, laden with their individual scents, could ever be mistaken for the other. Truth was found not with the eyes and ears, but with the nose. The scents of Clan Pukchaweeshka were martial and daring, assertive, and bound so closely to each other in the bonds of brotherhood that Enjikket felt his chest cramping with unspent emotion. To be in the midst of this foundry of determination was the consummation of a dream he had carried from his father’s first ill-advised stories of adventure. If it seems unlikely that a being as timid as a Jawa should be so overcome at the sight of courage, consider that it is always that which we lack which draws us most strongly.

Dathcha kept their introduction simple, mindful of the emotional tumult that drew away their thoughts. More complex training could begin later; for now, he showed them the ore hold, filled with scrap and salvage, the ore crushers and smelters, and the engine room, a cathedral-like space of darkness and heat and the rattling hymn of the reactor. Enjikket would do well here, he thought, noting his younger nephew’s fascination. For Yeelhoy, it would be the command pod--he pored over the chart table and hungrily eyed the controls. Dathcha was pleased. They had few enough resources to spare; that these boys slotted so easily into the needs of the clan was a good sign.

They were permitted one last day to be younglings, to have full run of the sandcrawler and meet their new clan members. They tumbled underfoot like mott pups, chattering and jumping with glee. There were no other children as young as they, in Clan Pukchaweeshka. There were no women, nor a shaman, nor a clan fortress. It was a bachelor clan, incipient, proving itself and its philosophy against the fury of the desert. They grew by recruitment, not birth; when their numbers became large enough, then perhaps they would found a fortress and take wives. For two boys, as-yet untouched by the thirsts of adulthood, such an existence was romantic in a way females could never be. They made their own tentative scent marks on a bulkhead in the engineering room, and swore to each other that they would join the brotherhood. Enjikket hung in his nest beside Yeelhoy that night, the canvas walls of the cocoon new and unscented, and hope flew forth from him as he slipped into oblivion.

What took place over the next five years was a test of strength, memory, courage, and will. The Jawas of Clan Pukchaweeshka were in form like any other Jawa; but in spirit, they strove to walk a different path. The instinct to flee before opposition was no less present in them, but they sought to overcome it and to make bold their claim upon the desert.

Theirs was a small clan. This was because it was new; older clans had had many generations in which to establish themselves, but Pukchaweeshka, Nebit’s upstart clan, had been started only ten years before, when he had found a derelict sandcrawler in the disputed territory between moisture farmers and the Sand People. He had, over the course of three years and with three of his closest friends--Ezjenk, Dathcha, and Haikchesh--managed to restore the sandcrawler to the point where he could drive it back into safe territory. All the elders agreed the act had been too brash, and if Nebit was so set upon putting himself in danger, far better he do so away from other, more sane-minded individuals. They allowed him to properly refit the engines, treads, reactor, and ore crusher, a task that took another two years, and kicked him out before he could recruit any other foolish younglings from their ranks. Wimateeka, Chief Elder, was especially incensed at the break from tradition. Jawas did not defy their larger, more ferocious neighbors, he insisted. They ran from them. Pukchaweeshka did not listen. They ventured into wild territory, braving Sand People, logras, krayts, and fellow scavengers with a temerity so foreign to their species that, perversely, it disarmed their foes. Not casually did they step into this fight. Their martial skills were honed to the best of their meager abilities, and thus did they defend the integrity of their actions. Yet do not overestimate, because of the gilded language of this account, their prowess. They were as children fighting with sticks. In the whole of the clan there were two blasters. One of them was Nebit’s own rifle, used more as a scepter than a weapon; the other was kept in Dathcha’s care, in a locked, rusted box over his nest, high enough that curious young nephews couldn't reach. Trust that in a true fight, one with opposition unsurprised by the hilarity of a Jawa brandishing a vibroblade with an edge dulled by inexperienced honing, they would last no longer than an infant’s bulwark of sand against an ocean wave. Despite this, there was a certain nobility to their efforts, a proud determination to stand and be heard, that was heightened by their innocence. We must all begin as children before we can grow.

Enjikket and Yeelhoy were the newest postulants into this renegade order of Jawa. They had the most to learn; they memorized the fundamentals of engine repair and navigation along with quarterstaff and anti-startle drills. Dathcha coached them in the ways of bravery, telling them to hold their ground instead of shrinking away. 

These lessons did not come naturally, and they did not come easily. And it was Nebit’s insistence upon them that kept their numbers small; had they cleaved to tradition, their numbers would have been great already. It is difficult to embrace a life so contradictory to one’s nature. Indeed, four years into his apprenticeship, Enjikket found himself in a turmoil of doubt and second-guessing.

The scene: a derelict hulk upon the dunes outside Mos Entha. It was well outside Pukchaweeshka’s territory, though this rarely concerned Jawas; if one didn't get caught, one was free to do whatever one wished. Nebit laid a careful path to the derelict, which he had heard spoken of from spacers mourning the death of the captain, who had been a friend. This course wended far from the fortress and common trails of the local clan, circling wide before creeping up to the downed ship for salvage in the night. Yeelhoy had been foolish enough to ask him why they were circling wide, if the Pukchaweeshka way was to strike boldly without fear of others.

“[Annoyance, irritation, disdain] Caution keeps men alive. Excess caution is shameful, but excess boldness is an embarrassment.” _As you are_ , Nebit’s scent carried.

Shocked by this harsh reprisal, Yeelhoy had asked Dathcha what it was he had done wrong. Dathcha, smarting from the embarrassment cast upon his tutoring, was brusque.

“[Anger, embarrassment] Clan Bopom Kova is the strongest in the habitable zone. We test them at our peril. Now sleep, you ignorant boy.”

Yeelhoy’s mortification and self-recrimination stung Enjikket’s nose. He slept fitfully that night, and this was perhaps why, upon reaching the freighter the next evening, Enjikket’s conduct was so poor.

The freighter was a YT-1300 Corellian, the workhorse of many a small merchant fleet. It was a ship of the same type as one with which we shall soon become acquainted: fast, idiosyncratic in its design, highly customizable, reliable, versatile, forgiving of mistakes, streamlined in shape--a squashed oval, almost a disc; a design which made it as nimble in atmosphere as in the vacuum of space--and with two gun emplacements clinging to its back and belly. It lay half-buried, its cargo strewn in a swath across the sand for several kilometers. Its hindquarters were bare to the heavens, its nose buried deep in the sand; the charred remains of a lake of fuel glassed the sand around it, sweeping wide and glittering like the train of an Iktotchi noblewoman. Evaporated tibanna coated the exposed hyperdrive in oxidation crystals, orange against their durasteel backdrop.

Yeelhoy was set as lookout atop the sandcrawler. It was a demanding position; it was high, and while it caught the cool night breeze, the metal had spent the day trapping the suns’ heat. Before he took up his post, Dathcha told him to recite all possible consequences, should they be spotted by Clan Kiluyak Bopom Kova.

“[Shame, mortification, regret] They can strangle our trade options. Speak ill of us to our contacts, deny us the hope of future mates, prevent a shaman from joining us. [Profound apology] They do not need weapons to lay us low.”

“[Stern approval] Yes. We strive for bravery, boy, but we do not forget the power of our roots. There is value in taking the hidden, passive route that we ignore at our peril.”

“[Penitence] Yes, Uncle.”

“Go take your position.”

If Yeelhoy was chastened, Enjikket was elated. He was to be the point for this scouting party, leading the way into the depths of the salvage and claiming whichever item he desired for his own. It was a prestigious position; and on so tense a claim, all the more worth bragging rights.

Elated--until he stepped into the shadow of the ruined vessel, and it rose over him, as sinister as the jagged maw of a krayt.

Enjikket did not consider himself a coward. He was a proper Pukchaweeshka clansman, and he was not afraid of a derelict freighter. Why, then, did his palms begin to sweat, and his breath come faster? Why did his body’s pheromones build and betray his anxiety to those around him? His steps grew jerky and hesitant, bereft of their confident swagger. The sand seemed to grip at his ankles, his robes tangled about his knees; every instinct in his body resisted his seemingly headlong, reckless passage into this netherworld. The scent of Twi’lek grew thick, beneath the near-overpowering stink of burnt circuits and scorched fuel. There was spice-smell, water-smell, rations-smell; he scented grease, leather, metal, squill, and--his heart lurched. Logra. The most common predator of Jawas, after their fellow sentients. A logra had been here, as early as that morning. This craft would provide an admirable nest, once the scavengers picked it clean; Enjikket had no doubt, in that panicked moment, that a full pride of logra had decided to claim the derelict as their own. His knees locked, his fear crushed him, and no inducement could have driven him further.

Forgive him, readers. He was young, and had not before been given the opportunity to test his mettle. It was now being tested now upon the anvil of courage, and an inclusion was found.

He was sent from the freighter in disgrace.

The Jawas’ labor carried long into the night. Work was done in total darkness, lit only by the crescent moons; inside the vessel they could risk hand lamps, but the spotlights of the sandcrawler were off-limits. It made little difference. Jawas were trained thieves and saboteurs from a lifetime of sneaking about the edges; these bolder few could work in even more difficult conditions. Besides, they were driven by the promise of rich salvage. A single night only was what they dared; come daylight, local scavengers would descend to pick over the corpse, and Pukchaweeshka would need to be long gone before then. Nimble hands pried at insulation, at tubing, at tumbled shipping crates; vats were held beneath intact transmission fluid and atmospheric braking lines and their precious ichor siphoned away. They stripped regulators, monitors, capacitors; countless meters of wire were spooled and rolled away. The hyperdrive unit--almost entirely intact but for the cracked coolant reservoir--was hacked straight out of the side and wedged into the cargo bay. There was, too, a comms system, badly damaged but reparable; that disappeared beneath the Jawas’ cloaks, to be used to patch their own faltering radio. The sandcrawler’s axles groaned beneath the weight of their bounty.

They found no logras.

Far worse, in Nebit’s eyes, than Yeelhoy’s ignorance was Enjikket’s cowardice. The boy was sat on a bench in the engine room and forbidden to join in the avaricious glee of his clansmen. Not for him were the choicest pieces of salvage; not for him, the profits of their sale. He had betrayed the very foundation of Nebit’s clan, and he would learn his lesson or leave. It was a terrible blow to such a young heart.

The time that followed was a difficult one for Enjikket, son of Yeelhoy. He had begun to make friends with the next-youngest clansman after his brother, an exceptionally tall Jawa named Pachwenko, whose robe was covered in mismatched patches and whom, in the characteristic practicality hidden by obviousness, the local, Basic-speaking settlers had taken to calling “Patches.” Pachwenko avoided Enjikket, now. He would not answer to Enjikket’s scent-calling, nor to his voice; indeed, when Enjikket asked him a question Pachwenko would turn aside. As far as punishments went, it was effective. Jawas were social creatures and sought the presence and reassurance of their fellows. But for a boy on the cusp of adulthood, who had made a mistake any young hunter might have, it was devastating.

Their next hunt was at the base of a steep cliff. Enjikket flung himself down the precipice without a seeming care for his own safety, scrambling like a jerba from rock to ledge to fissure without even the safety of a rope. Above, Nebit watched this display, and his scent grew disdainful.

They passed the next storm season in a sheltered box canyon beside a spring. Enjikket anxiety vibrated through the whole of the sandcrawler, tainting the air until all of Pukchaweeshka grew snappish with each other. His ostracism worsened, until only his brother and uncle would speak to him.

Enjikket’s behavior only grew more desperate. He volunteered for every mission; he refused all painkillers; he performed his courage and hard work ostentatiously for all to see. He saved Jek Nkik from a rockfall; he built a thorn fence about camp without gloves; he volunteered for night watches--the watches no Jawa chose with a light heart. No matter what he did, the scents of those around him grew derisive, and his fellows turned away.

The matter came to a head the next dew season, when the wild banthas began to herd and calve. Ukchet and Ezjenk had crested a dune to spot their heading, and Enjikket, mistaking the clustering of banthas around their young for the muster around a freshwater spring, deliberately sought to drive them from it--and nearly crushed Ukchet and Ezjenk in the resultant stampede. He found no water, and upon returning to the sandcrawler, he found no praise. Nebit was helping Ezjenk, his oldest friend, to hobble back to shelter; he had suffered a broken leg. The whirl of shock and anger through the clan struck the wind from Enjikket’s chest. He knew then a fear just as profound and instinctual as that which he had felt in the derelict ship, scenting a logra: the fear of isolation, of being cast out of the clan.

Nebit hissed at Dathcha. “[Wrathfulness, disgust] Attend to him.” So saying, he brought his friend into the sandcrawler, and left Dathcha to decide how best to school his nephew from his thoughtlessness.

Dathcha drew him aside. He said nothing for a time; his scent was burnished with frustration. “Child,” he said, and Enjikket, listening as he was through misery and not clarity, did not think to claim his manhood. “Child, Nebit needs a steady clansman, not a loose turbolaser.”

Enjikket stared at his feet. He was now almost as tall as his uncle; he suspected he would surpass him in another year.

“[Irritation, authority] Do you hear me, boy?”

“[Sullenness, despair] Yes.”

“Then why do you not respond!”

His uncle’s incredulity stung his nose and drew tears to his eyes. “[Desperation, anger] Because I have no other way of proving myself! You tell me to cease my efforts at bravery, what else, then, should I do!”

Dathcha’s tired sorrow filled the air, and the certain wry wisdom that age carried with it. It smelled like old feathers and well-oiled, hard-used joints. “Enjikket, this is not a redemption that can be forced. It may be no single event, but a wearing away over the course of many years. [Reassurance] If you stay true to our way, then it _will_ happen. We have all of us made mistakes.” His voice hardened, and his scent grew harsh. “But it will _not_ happen if you continue to act in this reckless manner. You are more valuable to us alive, Nephew.”

Enjikket smelled the salt-flat scent of his own tears. “But what can I do?”

“Did I not say? You must wait, and prove yourself _reliable_ , not brave.”

“What is the difference.”

Dathcha hesitated, and steeled himself against the small heresy he was about to speak. “Bravery is short-lived. Reliability is enduring, and is a form of bravery in itself--if you are reliable, then Nebit will trust you not to falter when a job needs doing. Even a job that requires courage.”

“It is not heroic.”

“No, but heroism is for stories, my boy. We live in reality, and heroes often wind up dead.”

“Are we not supposed to be bold?! You tell me ‘Be this way,’ but then you contradict it a breath later!”

“It is about balance, and choosing your battles. Even we cannot fight them all. Retreating one day can mean victory the next. Do you see?”

Enjikket did not, but his uncle’s words had struck a chord in him, though he did not realize it then. Later, after his tears had passed and he was calm once more, he began to think over what his uncle had told him, and decided he was very tired of trying to prove himself. He would keep to his engines and wait, as Dathcha had told him.

Months passed. His standing in the clan rose no higher, but eventually he was no longer ignored. First it was Pachwenko, soliciting his opinion on whether Ubrikkian or Kuat wiring was superior. Yeelhoy, sensing the change in the winds, drew Jek Nkik into a conversation with them, and Jek Nkik did not pull away. Enjikket scented his own tears again, that night, as he lay curled in his nest. They were tears of relief, perhaps, or of happiness and sincere repentance. Make what you will of the Jawas’ methods, but they were effective: Enjikket had cleaved himself to the clan more fiercely than ever.

Seasons changed. Wind rewrote the landscape; dunes shifted to cover salvage sites and uncover others. The Jawas of Nebit’s clan traced the old trade routes, forging new paths when they dared and keeping to the familiar when they dared not. The contents of their cargo hold waxed and waned. And through it all, Enjikket waited. His time would come, his uncle said. Already the elders of the clan--Ezjenk, Ukchet, and Haikchesh--were beginning to scent favorably when they beheld him.

When redemption came, it came without warning.

Zubwen was acting as lookout. It was a job he performed most often, him and his brother Pachwenko--they were the tallest in the clan, and they alone didn’t need to stand on the overturned junk bins to see out the cockpit windows. Yeelhoy was with them, acting as journeyman lookout and radiating boredom and hunger. Pachwenko threw a roll of flatbread at him, scented with annoyance and filled with spiced squill and hubba paste. Conversation was minimal. It was an unusually bright day--shimmers of heat broiled the durasteel sandcrawler. Zubwen stared at the upthrust of metal for a full ten minutes before realization struck: it was no mere rock formation, it was a vaporator tower, uncovered by the sand and ripe for the plucking. He squawked in excitement and sounded the alarm.

The sandcrawler came to a slow, creeping halt--so slow that it had passed the vaporator by a solid ten meters before it disgorged its passengers onto the sand.

An intact vaporator was a treasure beyond price. Parted out and sold piecemeal, it could keep a Jawa clan in fuel and food for a solid six months.

It was accident alone that placed Enjikket near the head of the column of excited Jawas. It was sheer bad luck that, of all his brethren, he alone drew the attention of the logra hiding in the burrow it had scraped beneath the shadow of the vaporator’s half-buried water cache.

A logra is the very essence of a hunter. Covered in thick, brindled fur, it could melt into the desert sand like the first taste of moisture until no hint of the beast’s presence remained. It stands a meter tall at the withers, borne upon four almost comically long legs ending in vicious claws. It is wiry, agile, clever, excessively toothy, endowed with a nose of exquisite sensitivity, and always hungry. Any being has reason to fear this creature, as it can run upwards of a hundred and thirteen kilometers per hour in short bursts, and has the strongest known bite short of the Dantooine hyena. To a Jawa, a logra is terror distilled.

A gust of wind, a single half-hearted breath of air flown from the southeast to lick at the caps of the dunes, was Enjikket’s salvation. He scented death upon it and dropped to the sand. Claws raked the air where he had stood.

In the heartbeat of time between the moment the logra landed and when it crouched anew, Enjikket felt the world around him slide to a halt.

Not idly had he spent the period of his disgrace. He had painstakingly gathered logra spoor when he could find it, or entered stale logra dens, and trained his body out of its natural flight response. He had practiced handling his durasteel blade with a grimness that had come to impress all the elders of the clan--even Nebit, though the patriarch did not show it to his least favorite. Enjikket practiced until the blade felt like an extension of his arm. He might not ever see a logra in his lifetime, he told himself, but if he did, he would not be caught flat-footed again. He would not be a coward.

The logra’s hind feet struck sand. Enjikket felt adrenaline surge through his body; his hands trembled, his breath came harshly, his sweat grew rank. The beast seemed to be ten feet tall, with teeth longer than he was. He thought he could feel its breath on his face, though it crouched three meters away, and each heated exhalation stank of a thousand painful deaths. Enjikket was afraid--but he was no longer aware of it. He had traversed through fear to the calm state beyond, and in a swift motion, he drew his knife. 

It could have been a battle of legend, had it not occurred in the time and place it had. The whys of this are not fit to tell at this juncture; I will leave you instead with the singular image of a young Jawa, armed only with a blade, striving against the might of a beast that outweighed him half again over. Sinews strained. Sweat flew. Blood spattered the sand. And when it was done, only the Jawa still stood.

Enjikket stood beside the crumpled form, small in the shade of his clan’s unexpected good fortune, and he shook with the magnitude of his luck. The knife fell from his nerveless fingers, clotting the sand around it with blood.

“Logra-killer,” he heard a voice behind him say; and turning, he saw Pachwenko standing near at hand. The entirety of the clan stood with him, silently watching. The same dry breeze that had saved Enjikket’s life now stymied him, for he was upwind, and could not smell the feelings of his brothers. They stood for a moment in the silence of the open desert, the victor over the fallen foe, the clan arrayed before him, when a single Jawa stepped forward: Nebit, son of Nekchit, come to survey the carnage.

Enjikket had heard of a substance, composed solely of water and yet so cold it had become solid. “Ice,” it was called. He had never smelled or seen or felt ice, but he suspected he was made of it, in that moment. It seemed that, having faced the worst natural threat a Jawa knew, the only fear left to him was his chief’s angry dismissal. He bowed his head and awaited his judgment.

Nebit walked up to him, silent but for his footsteps, and the scents Enjikket drew from his robes made no sense.

“[Awe, pride] Enjikket.” He looked over the carcass of the logra. “Well done.”

At this cue, the clan entire descended upon Enjikket, a delirious swirl of triumph, adoration, and pride. Enjikket, still dizzy with the affirmation he had sought so dearly, reeled and almost went down; dozens of hands drew him up and raised him to their shoulders.

“Enjikket!” they shouted. “Logra-killer!”

Later, the vaporator would be dug from its grave, and the logra would be stripped of its hide and bones, to be sold as trophies. Its meat, too gamy even for Jawas, would be left for their fellow scavengers to feast upon. They would pass by the krayt graveyard, the best landmark in the otherwise featureless reaches of the Western Dune Sea, and make their steady way through the lowlands of Jundland for the clan meeting. But for now, it was a time for celebration: a youngling had reached manhood and become the equal of his fellows. The party lasted long into the night. Enjikket found himself on the roof of the sandcrawler, staring up at the stars. Yes, he thought, buoyed upon fellowship and pride, it was a good time to be alive.

 

XIV. Hot Pursuit

A dewback lumbered over a ridge of sand, slow and laborious, each footstep deliberately placed, her snout raised into the wind. A saddle was affixed to her back, though its rider was absent. She opened her mouth to taste the air. There was an oasis within a day’s walk. She wanted the succulent, water-filled plants that clustered together near damp ground, and especially the small creatures that fed upon them. She began to trudge eastward towards the water-smell, but her rider caught up to her, his white armor startling against her brown hide, and seized her bridle. She lowed with discontent. The stormtrooper paid it no mind. He led her back to the patrol with a steady hand and a grumbling heart. He had hoped for a slow week to catch up on his backlog of _Limmie Galactic_ , but a company from the 501st Legion itself had landed and conscripted the entire garrison to comb the desert. There were three of Vader’s Own in this squad, a lieutenant and two troopers, and they regarded the local boys with a disdain that set Private Murrow’s teeth on edge.

“Uppity bastards,” he muttered to himself in the safety of his helmet. “Wouldn't know their heads from their hindquarters if it weren't for us keeping ‘em from wandering into a sarlacc pit.” He half-hoped the colonel caught that on his logs check, because Murrow _knew_ he'd been mad enough to spit fire when that Firstie CO started throwing his weight around. It seemed only fair he get a laugh, after some useless soft-skin commander--a _commander_ , who didn't even have the gett’se to wear the armor--sent all his men into the deep desert.

They hadn't even been told what they were looking for. Twenty minutes’ frantic muster followed by a three-day trek from Bestine to the edge of no man’s land, all the while enduring the derision of the 501st. Murrow’s blaster had never been so well-taken care of. He tightened his grip on his dewback’s reins and gazed over the horizon. Smack in the middle of the Western Dune Sea, adrift in sand, pounded by heat, and with nothing to go on besides that it was a matter “of interest to the Empire.” If Jerko--“That’s _Lieutenant Jeriko_ to you, trooper”--kept on his shebs about discipline for much longer, Murrow was sure he’d have to log an “accidental” weapons discharge with the quartermaster when he got back to base. He was sure the colonel wouldn't give him more than a slap on the wrist for it.

Murrow clicked on a private channel to Gehudy, the Corellian ordnance specialist who'd been assigned to this dust ball two years ago, midway through Murrow’s second tour. “So much for Pickerson’s spice interdiction,” he said.

Gehudy’s icon glowed blue in the lower corner of Murrow’s HUD. Helmet chatter was unilaterally recorded. The frequency of this conversation might not be on squad-wide settings, but someone eventually would have to listen to what two stormtroopers in the middle of nowhere thought about eating the 501st’s dust. “Not like we were getting a slice of that pie,” Gehudy finally replied.

“Yeah, not with the Firsties here to swindle it away from us.”

“Don’t think they're after spice.”

Murrow sighed, slapping his dewback’s side. “Whatever the fek it is, I'm sick of standing around while they fekking stare at it.”

“Hurry up and wait,” Gehudy said with a hoarse chuckle. “Just another day in paradise, here on--”

“--shebfekking Belderone,” Murrow said in concert, grinning. The brief flash of humor faded. 

They had found it, for whatever “it” was worth, half an hour ago on the northern edge of the Dune Sea, near the foothills of Jundland. Sunslight had glinted off metal so keenly that Murrow had had to increase the polarization on his helmet lenses to keep from going blind. All three of the 166th, savvy to the whims of the desert, had turned to see if it was sand glare or Jawas. It was neither. A brilliant patch of blue shone halfway up a dune almost a kilometer away, as though a chunk of the sky had fallen to rest. The hull of an escape pod, reflecting the heavens. A strange, tense excitement built in Murrow’s chest--this could be his ticket off this rock.

“That's probably it,” Felth said, voicing their thoughts. “The Jawas would have carried that off already, if it'd been there for a while.”

Murrow grunted, unwilling to concede anything to Davin Felth. Felth the Filth, they called him. Regimental pariah. Old Davin’d had a sweet seat in the Armored Division, but managed to fek it up so badly the brass kicked him out to the edge of the galaxy. No one wanted to get too close in case the stupid was catching.

He was right, though. This was almost perfectly beneath the _Devastator_ ’s coordinates at the time the colonel had gotten orders to muster--Murrow knew to do the math, when the heat got high--and there was a Jawa trade route all of ten kilometers away. If the 501st was looking for something, this was probably it. They sat on their dewbacks and quietly pondered their options: keep silent and mark the location for themselves, or--the less-savory prospect--alert their “allies” and lose the payout. Before Murrow had even managed to parse them, Felth spoke up.

“Lieutenant, we’ve got something here you might want to see.”

“Hey!” Murrow glared at Felth, but the Firsties were already hauling their beasts’ heads over and coming up duneside to regroup.

“That’s it,” the louie said. “Good work, trooper.”

“Suck-up,” Murrow muttered.

Felth managed to hunch in his armor. “Fek you,” he muttered back. “I want off this rock.”

“What, like they're gonna let little old you take the credit?”

“They might!”

“Gentlemen,” Jerko said, and ice ran down Murrow’s spine. They'd been on squad comms. “Shut the fierfek up.”

That had been half an hour ago. Now the three 501st boys were clustered around the downed escape pod, letting the garrison complement cool their heels while they went and made fools of themselves. Anyone could see there were two sets of tracks, one to the north and one to the south, and the one going north was wheeled. That one was probably an astromech. They probably wanted that one; astros were popular with smugglers here on the Outer Rim--nice and nondescript. Murrow didn't know what Darth Vader taught his “elite troops,” but it sure as hell wasn't tracking. Murrow’s dewback, a grouchy heifer who went, more or less, by the name of Shortstack, huffed toward whatever it was she smelled in the distance. Gehudy let his Deet-19 sag, a victim of the midday heat. Their armor had climate controls for just about every environment, but local temps easily reached forty-three degrees in the shade, and there wasn't any shade around for a long, long ways. Felth scratched at his helmet seals. Murrow perused the Imperial bounty boards posted to the HoloNet through his HUD. The odds of whoever was in the pod being on them were slim--this seemed like a job the Empire wanted on the down-low--but it passed the time. Below, Lieutenant Jerko pointed toward the tracks.

“Someone _was_ in the pod. The tracks go off in this direction.”

Murrow couldn't restrain his snort. 

Another Firstie popped up, from where he had been investigating the sand. “Look sir! Droids!”

Gehudy let his head sag forward in mute despair. 

They dithered a while longer before Jerko pointed north. “Makes you wonder what they do with all the smart ones,” Gehudy said as Murrow climbed back in the saddle.

Felth turned to look at him, but said nothing.

 

XV. We Come to An Outpost of Civilization

C-3PO listened to the lull of the engines and was soothed. A steady engine meant travel, meant reliable mechanics, meant he was at rest and had no responsibilities to look to. Even this dreadful transport, lacking any comfort or kindness save the presence of his friend, was better when in motion. Movement presaged a destination; and while any destination these creatures could conjure would doubtless be hideous, movement at least meant they had not yet reached it. C-3PO was not one given to flights of imagination; he counted himself a realist, sensitive to the capriciousness of the world around them. Theirs was not a race treasured as organics were. Organic beings died in myriad ways, some more noble than others; yet for all the ways they died, their deaths were mourned. When a droid “died”--usually at the hands of its owner, and on a whim--no one mourned. They were neither buried nor burned, nor left exposed for the elements to dispose of. That was not the final fate of a droid’s mortal shell. Instead, they were ground to pieces and used to make new droids. C-3PO’s wires had filled the innards of countless predecessors. He supposed he could say, were he to attempt the faith of so many organics, that their wisdom flowed through his veins. In a past “life,” C-3PO may perhaps have loaded cargo on a spacedock, or calculated navsat trajectories through the spangled void, or maybe even powered a battle droid on the side of the Confederacy. His plating might have covered droids from the finest lineages of Corellia and Naboo. He contained an infinity of history beneath his skin, yet however noble or humble his history, he was a droid, and a droid’s safety was never secure, no matter the state of their sentience, for the simple fact that they lacked organic components. So it was, that when C-3PO felt the engines of the sandcrawler shift in tone, growing deeper and slower and winding down to a pinging, heated stop, he woke. He had little trust in their grasping, smelly captors; a stop could only bode ill for their unfortunate cargo. R2-D2 was asleep beside him, the ready lights on his stubby fuselage blinking slowly; C-3PO tapped on his dome to rouse him.

“Wake up.” This seemed to have no effect; C-3PO pounded harder, sending vibrations down through his counterpart’s metal body. “Wake up!”

R2-D2 powered up with an irritability that the reader may feel justified, given the rudeness of his awakening. The fondness of reunion had worn off, replaced with the reality of what companionship actually entailed. He swiveled a jaundiced sensor toward C-3PO, but the taller droid’s attention was elsewhere, to the front of the cargo hold in which they had been deposited.

Before them, clanking open with a slow, deafening creak of rusted metal, the hold doors fell forward into a ramp, opening onto the blazing inferno of sun and gathered heat like the doors into the sixth hell. From this gash of light that cut through the benighted gloom of the hold, a procession of brown-robed imps emerged, wielding droid callers and surly tempers. They gathered the best-looking of the imprisoned droids--best- _looking_ , C-3PO noted tartly, for he was certain that the dome-shaped calibration droid was moving on force of habit alone--and herded them toward the doors.

C-3PO turned to R2-D2 and said mournfully, “We’re doomed.”

The Jawas’ leader moved among the cargo, exuding an air of confidence reminiscent of any nobleman C-3PO had seen in the surveillance of his demesnes. He pointed at droids every so often, or at promising piles of scrap. He turned, his eyes glowing gold and impersonal from the black depths of his hood, and gestured at C-3PO and R2-D2 as well. Then he went on down the corridor, his attention drawn away by some other concern.

“Do you think they’ll melt us down?”

R2-D2 did not respond, for two Jawas crowded up to them in Chief Nebit’s wake, gibbering demands at them and pulling them forward. C-3PO failed to move as swiftly as they would like, his feet tangling in loose wires even as his own reticence betrayed him, and one of them pulled a droid caller, brandishing it threateningly.

C-3PO threw up his hands. “Don't shoot, don't shoot!” He carefully unstuck his feet, and with R2-D2’s stolid, reassuring presence at his back, made his way forward to the waiting Jawas.

“Will this never end?”

Slowly, moving at the pace of the slowest droid (though none of them were eager enough to move for the Jawas’ taste), the captives were herded out of the sandcrawler onto hardpack sand. Here is the sight that met them: flatlands, smooth as a pane of glass, painted white with sodium deposits, barren, vast, bound only by the blue bowl of the sky. The suns beat upon this anvil, reflecting upwards; not content to cook from above, this furnace baked from below as well. A berm rose to the east, upon which grew tufts of withered grasses; they profited from the same presence of moisture that fed the durasteel spires of vaporators, standing sentinel over this uncompromising plain. To the north, thirty meters away at the most, stood a cluster of domes, white as the salt flats around them. Beyond, another berm--artificially made, shaped in a circle; from the center of this depression rose the peaks of a communications tower and household vaporator, the bulk of their delicate systems kept below the reach of the omnipresent sandstorms that whipped over this desert expanse, building force as they went, paying no mind to the homesteads in their paths.

The droids were arranged before this humble outpost: C-3PO, R2-D2, a red R3 unit, a massive black R1 unit, a multi-armed agricultural unit missing half of its arms and nearing the end of its mobility. Nebit went forth to make his salutation to the proprietor, presumably a farmer, as he emerged from the largest of the domes. He was, to C-3PO’s none-too-discerning eye, a grizzled fellow, human, stout about the middle and weathered by sun and low humidity. He gestured Nebit onward, saying little through the jawa’s opening spiel but examining the displayed cargo with a savvy, cagey eye.

It was then that C-3PO understood their fate. The Jawas weren't going to part them out, or melt them down, or even set them to work.

They were being sold.

***

_To be continued…_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you liked what you read (and if you have a tumblr), I would be very glad if you took the time to reblog [here](http://guerre-des-etoiles.tumblr.com/post/150507328048/un-nouvel-%C3%A9spoir-chapter-2-the-fall-archive). Thanks for reading :)


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